Need drives invention. Many of the world's best filmmaking tools were built by people who needed them themselves. A few examples: Digital Domain wanted a "new compositor," and so they took to building "Nuke." Slack was originally an in-house chat tool for a game developer.

And now, here comes Mekajiki with the release of RenderGarden, a tool the company initially developed to speed up their After Effects renders for sister company Swordfish, a commercial house.  

Render Garden is designed to live in the space between the use of internal render tools in AE and the building of a full-on render farm. Render farms can be both expensive and complicated, requiring extensive maintenance and full-time engineering support. Knowing that a frustrating, slow experience awaits anyone having to rely on an internal system render, something in between needed to be found.

This new product wouldn't necessarily be a render farm, but something smaller, something you could maintain yourself. Something that anyone could learn to manage on their own with a little bit of time. And so RenderGarden was born.

Rendering can now be a much faster process allowing you to head home from a job early. 

RenderGarden works to speed up your renders by turning your machine into a miniature render farm. If you've ever turned on your "activity monitor" while rendering, you've noticed that very few programs make effective use of all of your system resources simultaneously. RenderGarden uses that unused processing power, and can even be set up to render your project in the background while you keep working on other compositions in AE (this means less time spent goofing off and more time working).

Whether you're the head of a company or a freelancer working on a specific project, rendering can now be a much faster process allowing you to head home from a job early. It can also be set up for network rendering using idle processing power for other machines on your network; it's like how Q Master was supposed to function with Final Cut, although in this case, all reports indicate that RenderGarden, unlike Q Master, actually works. 

Available for only $99, with a free demo available. Check out the Mekajiki website for more.

Tech Specs

  • Network rendering
  • Background Rendering while continuing to work in After Effects
  • Post render transcode to MP4 and/or QT for approvals
  • Average of 3X speed increase on renders
after effectsmekajikirender farmRenderGarden
Editing & Post-Production