Blackmagic Forum

Hi folks,

has there been any talk with rendering in cli mode?

This talk again rises as I got my hands on some Sweet Sweet BRaw footage, and my macbook, well, you guess the rest. I was thinking editing on my macbook and then exporting timeline/project to google cloud and purchase some render time.

I saw some notes (https://gist.github.com/garyo/c398abc2d3d6f801a61ad86a0f5b651e, garyo) about davinci scripting and it seems it could be already doable with some thought into this.

Anyone any success?

Some other threads about similar things:

Resolve in 'Headless Mode' -nogui https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=104557

Rendering assets from CMD https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=31291


Troubles on running remotely with P100: https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=166882

Another link setting up remote renderer:

Windows server

Well, this isn't CLI mode per sē, but success anyway.

It was easy to get a Datacenter Server from Google Marketplace with Nvidia grid license
https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/nvidia/nvidia-rtx-virtual-workstation-windows-server-2022

It costs about $1-$2/running hour depending a bit on settings. Davinci runs Very fast and smooth.

Connecting happens via normal RDP, tested on Mac (Microsoft Remote Desktop).

You more likely still have to install GPU Grid drivers to server from https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/g ... vers-table

Only downside is that windows doesn't have all codecs and Microsoft Store is not available to server.


Linux server

I wasn't able to get Linux server to work. After a few days only thing I got was a blank screen on Davinci or error 999. The RDP is slow as hell, and tested also tigervncserver and NoMachine.

Linux server might be usable in CLI mode or as a remote renderer server linked to same shared project.

The remote render is kind of hands off. No need to send jobs in CLI. You set them up in the Deliver page. The remote render node can be headless and launched via CLI if that's what you're asking for.

The scaling is not flexible. It's one job per one render node. If you have multiple render nodes and a single job to render only one render node will be employed.

You can setup and start/stop/control render jobs using the API, but it's not all that necessary unless you're building a render manager of some sort. All that functionality exists in the Deliver page of the machine submitting the job.

Cloud rendering may or may not be cost effective depending on your specific circumstances.