Greetings Michele, c ould you explain your position in Youare ?

I co-lead the 3D department taking care of the tech side of the production.

Could you make a little short of your past experiences ?

I started in 1989 doing 3D and 2D digital productions in various fields of applications. In 1994 I joined Alias Research, that soon became Alias|Wavefront, as an application engineer. Back to postproduction in 2001, since then I deal with 3D contents for film and video.

Could you tell us how you found Muster and why you choosed it ?

I had the chance to test it on a large farm in 2000 choosing among the Alias|Wavefront development partners and I was so happy that I decided I didn't want to take care of hand managed batch files across multiple computers anymore.
Since then I choosed Muster as my technical solution for render distribution following its growth in the past five years and I find it simple, powerful and reliable whether you have hundreds clients or just a bunch of workstations. Version 5 includes many requested feature and I think it's perfectly tailored for our needs.

Could you tell us what kind of benefits have you got using Muster ?

You start thinking about render jobs like a print on the printer instead of being obsessed by the complexity of manually distribute processing jobs on every single computer. You just send it to the dispatcher and almost forget about it.
The Dispatcher user interface allows you to keep your jobs under constant control even from home via the web server. If a frame or a job has a problem you can easily requeue it. It also allows you to optimize your processing power according to many principles. light jobs can be sent to the worst computers in the farm and complex jobs to the more performant units.
For instance we use Maya and its render layer feature; we often choose different render engines for different layers and we send the jobs that require Mental Ray for Maya to the licensed workstation while all the other unlicensed workstation can process Maya native render jobs. Mental Ray for Maya needs a valid Maya license while Maya native render is free across a practically unlimited number of CPU.

Could you tell us what kind of benefits have you experienced upgrading to Muster 5?

First of all the Dispatcher is now multiplatform and allows us to plan a transition of it on a linux box.
I like the new customizable structure and I like the new features in explorer's user interface. The new progress bar is a great improvement. We did the beta testing on a demanding production and this has helped us a lot in refining Muster functionality.

Thank you to the Muster development team for being so patient and efficient.

Thanks for you time, Michele.