If you've bought a gift, please fill out this form to help me track and acknowledge your gift: Gift Information Form
Please don't feel pressured to buy anything. You can also see the items on the list as my personal goals that I intend to purchase myself. The best way to support me is still through Patreon or by directly purchasing votes, as this helps me more significantly and allows me to save money to achieve my goals. Of course, I would be extremely grateful if you choose to buy a gift directly.
There are two links above, the second one is from Amazon UK because I found that some items are cheaper there.
Most of the items on my wishlist are related to computer hardware upgrades. However, due to the very few new requests in recent months, I might slow down video updates, take more time to rest and go out. Slowing down the updates will lead to a further decrease in requests. Therefore, upgrading hardware to pursue speed may not be a high priority at the moment. When I used to release three or more videos a day, rendering speed was a major headache.
The related items can be categorized as follows:
1. Mac Studio: Purchased in early 2022, this is my main work machine for daily tasks, and all editing work is done on it. Initially, a lot of rendering work was also done directly on this machine, but now, two years later, rendering has become very slow, and I can hardly do any other work while rendering. Initially, I could make video thumbnails while rendering. Of course, besides the gradual obsolescence of the hardware, this could also be due to the videos being more complex now than they were initially.
2. Windows PC: Other than upgrading the graphics card from 3080 to 4090 last year, the other hardware was purchased in early 2021. The PC's main tasks are Blender visualizer creation, MV video frame interpolation, and final video integration rendering. Currently, other than the graphics card, the other components may need upgrading, especially since editing with Blender often causes a lot of stuttering in the workspace.
3. NAS: I initially had an entry-level Synology NAS a few years ago, which was my first introduction to NAS. Its performance was too poor, so I later replaced it with a NAS made from a retired mining machine, which improved performance but was suboptimal in terms of energy efficiency, noise, and stability, and it also damaged several hard drives. I've been planning an upgrade, and building my own NAS might be the most cost-effective option.
4. Render Servers: Many elements in my videos are generated by software I've written over the years, and they are finally integrated and rendered into the final videos you see using traditional video editing software. As the videos have become more complex over the years, with more elements and layers, rendering times have increased significantly. If an error is found and re-rendering is required, the rendering time multiplies.
I believe that the editing errors visible in my videos are fewer compared to other channels, not because I make fewer mistakes, but because I often discover and correct them upon review. Given the numerous elements in my videos, multiple revisions are quite common, making the need for faster rendering a persistent challenge.
Through long-term exploration, I believe that, for my personal situation, deploying multiple low-end servers for parallel rendering is the best solution, especially economically. Therefore, in 2022, I purchased four computers at an average price of around $350 each, with the lowest-end components except for the CPU. I also used different CPUs for comparison to find a reasonable configuration. After two years of high-load operation, two of them have since failed to start, so I currently need to supplement with new computers and upgrade the others to improve rendering speed.
5. Hard Drives: The files for rendered videos, frame-interpolated MVs, Visualizers, etc., are all very large, so hard drive capacity has always been tight.
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