Rebus Farm - bad experience

[Devin Johnston]

I just recently had an experience using Rebus farm that I want to share and hopefully spare some of you from the pain I went through. Yesterday I ran into a time crunch with an animation project, I needed to render 3 minutes of footage by this morning. My render farm is powerful but not up to the task of doing this in one night. I decided to use Rebus mainly because they have a convenient plugin for Max which makes exporting and managing easy. My initial test went very well and using their online calculator my job was estimated to cost about $1700 and take less than 2 hours. This seemed reasonable to me and so I made the purchase. A few hours later I’m trying to upload my scene files, it’s taking quite a while but there’s a lot of data. For some reason the upload keeps failing on certain files, this didn’t happen during my test. After a few hours of trying I managed to get both of my scenes uploaded but I couldn’t get the farm to start rendering. At this point I contacted tech support and to my surprise they told me the farm was having technical problems and that’s why I couldn’t’ get anything to render. When asked how long it would be down the only answer they could give was a few hours. I was told that when the farm was back up I’d get priority and they’d throw as many machines at it as possible. It was close to midnight by the time the farm came back online, my meeting in which this animation was to be shown was at 10am, I figured I had plenty of time. The job began using 12 computers and I assumed more would be added, in the end over 50 were working on it but by the time my meeting happened it had only rendered about 30% of the project. The whole reason for using Rebus was because of its ability to quickly render, this just didn’t happen.

 

I decided to contact Rebus to find out what was going on and why the calculator was so wrong. They let me know that the calculator wasn’t accurate, that the times it gives are based on the entire farm working on a job but this would never happen. When asked why there isn’t a warning stating that the calculator isn’t even remotely accurate the answer was “we need to change that”. Not only is the calculator totally wrong but so is the amount of render points needed to complete a job like this. The $1700 that was quoted to me wouldn’t even cover half of the job. I can’t help but think that this is deliberately misleading. The way they have it set up it’s impossible to get a quote on what a large animation project would cost or how long it would take to complete. This will result in projects costing 2 or 3 times more than the initial quote which is good for Rebus but bad for you and me. I don’t know if this was done deliberately but I feel that if they were concerned with being honest and up front they’d at least have a disclaimer.

 

Edit 7-25-2014

Andre from Rebus has given me a full refund and apologized for the problems I experienced.

Edited July 25, 2014 by Maxer

[Scott Schroeder]

That sucks to hear. However, every time I've used their calculator I end up with 5-10 credits left so I've always found it to be somewhat accurate and my turn around times have been 2-4 hours for ~5000 frames and that's just using economy.

 

Though, I use my estimates based on a 3 year old i7 machine. So maybe that's what helps is that you have to dumb things down a bit and, as always, add in 10-15% contingency if you have a faster machine.

 

It sounds like due to their downtime, they had a serious backlog. Hopefully you can recoup some of your money from them as it really was on their end that this happened.

[Devin Johnston]

That sucks to hear. However, every time I've used their calculator I end up with 5-10 credits left so I've always found it to be somewhat accurate and my turn around times have been 2-4 hours for ~5000 frames and that's just using economy.

You rendered 5000 frames in 2-4 hours, what were your render times per frame like?

[Scott Schroeder]

I had known we were going to use Rebus from the get-go, so I have a fairly optimized preset. On that 3 year old i7, I get about 15-30 minutes per frame at 1080 depending on how much glossy reflecting is going on. I do have some noise in the frame (and some can think it is an unacceptable level), but I clean it out with Denoiser from Red Giant and it does a pretty good job. If a scene is particularly heavy in glossy reflections, I have been known to break the scene down into the core elements, build it back up in post, and just blur the reflections in post.

[Devin Johnston]

That's not too far from what my render times were. If you had a job with 2500 frames and submitted it to Rebus would you expect 8 hours later to only be at 30% completion?

[Scott Schroeder]

That's not too far from what my render times were. If you had a job with 2500 frames and submitted it to Rebus would you expect 8 hours later to only be at 30% completion?

 

Absolutely not. Hopefully they will credit you something or all of your money, as your experience was not what I have come to expect when I've used them

[Devin Johnston]

They did give me a partial credit, about half of the total amount but I don't plan on ever using them again so they got paid and I lost a job.

[andrekonnopasch]

Ceo Rebusfarm here

 

Over night we were a job with several GB of textures but super low rendertime. 370 nodes picked up that monster job the same time and loading the job files lagged lagged down our network to zero. That times-outs current running jobs and jobs restarted over and over again until we spoted the troubble maker. That happend unexpected and messed up a lot. Job costs estemate , progress and more

At 1am our time the matter appeared - at 3am the main admin arrived and started to fix all jobs till 8 or 9am.

We added all possible nodes to Devin and at 70% progress he agreed to stop the render.

We resetted all the spend render points - not just a few. BTW I have no problem to payback the cash!

 

We all depend on soft and hardware - sometimes Murphys Law sadly happens.

In 7 years we missed just 2 deadline due to farm reasons. All in all a good ration imo (even it not help you now)

A bad experiance for you and I deeply appologize.

For sure the last night was not common.

 

andre

Edited July 24, 2014 by andrekonnopasch

[neil poppleton]

I would have thought a full refund was the least they could do Devin.

[Zdravko Barisic]

I would have thought a full refund was the least they could do Devin.

 

+1

[heni30]

Ceo Rebusfarm here

 

We all depend on soft and hardware - sometimes Murphys Law sadly happens.

In 7 years we missed just 2 deadline due to farm reasons. All in all a good ration imo (even it not help you now)

A bad experiance for you and I deeply appologize.

For sure the last night was not common.

 

andre

 

Those 2 missed deadlines are 2 too many. We are all responsible for a plan B in case of hardware/software failure. In your case your company should have another rendering company ready to step in in case of an emergency - it could be a mutual agreement.

[Tommy L]

Those 2 missed deadlines are 2 too many. We are all responsible for a plan B in case of hardware/software failure. In your case your company should have another rendering company ready to step in in case of an emergency - it could be a mutual agreement.

 

Thats a bit harsh. I dont know how many jobs they had in 7 years, but Ill bet its a lot. If they have truly only missed 2 x deadlines I'd say thats a good record. It also sounds like they refunded all the money, maybe after they read Devin's online critique of the service.

 

Its tough on Devin though. As a client of mne said "excuses are for kids". If I dont deliver I just hold up my hands and say its all on me. You just cant turn around and blame the guy behind you (Rebus) even though it was their fault. It probably did cost him a client and Rebus cant provide a refund for that.

[Devin Johnston]

We added all possible nodes to Devin and at 70% progress he agreed to stop the render.

I just want to clarify that I did agree to stop the rendering (at 35% completion) once it was clear that no amount of processing power was going to finish the job in time.

 

We resetted all the spend render points - not just a few. BTW I have no problem to payback the cash!

I gladly accept your offer.

[Devin Johnston]

Its tough on Devin though. As a client of mne said "excuses are for kids". If I dont deliver I just hold up my hands and say its all on me. You just cant turn around and blame the guy behind you (Rebus) even though it was their fault. It probably did cost him a client and Rebus cant provide a refund for that.

Thanks Tom for pointing that out, it's still unknown whether my firm will get the project or not but seeing as my animation was a big part of our presentation it didn't help our chances. I'm also going to have to deal with the lack of confidence this has generated in my abilities to meet a deadline. I've never missed delivering anything for an interview and it's going to be a while before this is forgotten.