drag and drop render queue for os x

I recently got an email from Greg D suggesting a post on the lab experiments Andrew Andoru has been working on – Thanks Greg, what a great idea! If you remember Andrew had some droplets that would render from After Effects, Nuke and Maya easily – basically doing a terminal render with some automation and without going to the terminal.  He has also created some apps that will allow you to run multiple instances of applications such as After Effects and Maya – again easily without the use of the terminal. Now Andrew is creating a drag and drop render queue for OS X which you can find and download here.

Andrew mentions “Just a little teaser and interest check for a simple little app I am working on. A drag and drop render queue system for After Effects, Maya, Nuke, and Shake, and possibly more in the future. (Any app that supports command line rendering should work).

Simply drag and drop multiple project files or scripts onto the droplet, even if they are of different types, and the app will automatically determine how to submit them and render them within Terminal in a queue. It will display clear messages in Terminal on which renders are currently active, when the started an finished, and even custom render finished sounds for when the queue is finished!

It really is a tool currently meant for local use on single workstations or as a tool to make multi-machine rendering easy to manage for individuals or small teams with multiple workstations. Just using built in screen sharing in OS X and a tool like this it should be extremely easy to manage renders across multiple systems.

More info and a demo video is coming soon. As I said, just wanted to see if this is something people would be interested in. It will likely be free but a lot of work went into this tool so if you happen to download this in the future don’t get stingy with those donations!”