Sure - I really should have done that at the time...useless bellyaching here and I think I did start getting stuff together. But I only have limited time and bug reports have to be done thoroughly for them to be of any use to you. There'll be opportunity to give CR another crack in the near future so when/if it causes problems I'll try to pull together a decent report.

Update: I came back after 3 hours and Old VFX had only gone up 66%. Which is clearly not right. I've stopped and restarted the render. I'll update if the situation improves. Update 2: Yeah, nah....it's not balancing the computers properly. I've gone to manual load balancing, but it might be more efficient to use the placeholder method and render on each computer separately. I have yet to successfully render anything with CR, despite having the perfect setup for it. I'll keep plugging away. Update 3: Sadly, none of the Crowdrender frames worked....they were all black. Everything works fine local mode. Everything looked like they were rendering...everything synced, and all the computers were connecting fine. The renders took the right sort of time per computer, but the only things printed were black frames. It's maddening I can't CR to work.

Hi James, What I meant was, if you use the denoiser in the render pane, and not in the compositor, you will get different results from each render node, meaning you will see a visible line in the CR tiles. It's important to denoise as a last step in the compositor. It's also faster. Also, with denoising it is tempting to shoot for lower sample settings. I am aware that different contexts will allow for different sample settings, but over time I am starting to get a slight feel for what will be needed where. But I am painfully going through trial and error and everyone is so damned coy about fleshing out the ball park rates they have come to, or ways to approach it. Do people split the scenes into background and foreground and composite later routinely for example? So another example, the lower the amount of light in the scene, the more noise. Volumetrics also increase noise because it is scattering light unevenly. The more light bounces the slower the render, but it my not always be necessary to have light bounces, allowing for faster render and higher sample counts. Do you go for higher volume light bounces and then reduce the effect in compositing? There must be some relation between the amount of light in a scene and sample setting in order to make for successful temporal denoising later. The Optix and Intel deniers are similar and the intel seems a bit better at animation, but should we avoid using them altogether? I am leaving them on and including a denoising pass in the EXR. The reason I mentioned going through the step of bring the multilayer EXR into Blender to split up (and or denoising) is because my VFX software does not handle multilayer EXR - only single layer. I am finding file output while rendering to be unreliable, but exporting the layers from the multilayer to work fine. Putting numbers on things, for medium-low light, between 700 to 1200 samples looks to be enough for a temporal denoiser to handle. Medium to high light, you could maybe get away with 500 samples. Anything lower than that might be possible but it will be tricky. It looks to me that the more movement in the scene the higher samples required. So for medium movement add 100 to 200 samples. For greater movement add maybe 200 to 300. I could be wrong about that...just trying to put some numbers on things.

Ok support ticket sent. I've double checked everything and I tried a simple test file, all with the same result. Hopefully it will help you get to the bottom of the problem. If I can see that this will work for me then I will become a very enthusiastic subscriber. It's very attractive: re-purpose perfectly serviceable retired computers to help with rendering, and without having to continually pack files which I found to be clunky, inefficient, and unreliable. Plus the option of getting some extra help via the cloud. I really, really hope we can figure this out.

Hi there, I was very careful to make sure to use the same version of Blender and CR. WRT CR it might be worth my double checking the Linux master machine but I am 99% certain it is also the same. I went back to 2.90.1 for all versions of blender. I will check the logs as you suggest. Are there any other error logs I can use to check?

Update 2: It seems like from other research that 2.91 is not supported. Is that right?

Update: Even connecting to my Mac which is on the same network hub yeilds the same result. No indication of whether the connection has failed and no real connection. It ought to connect - the two computers are connected over LAN. Also to clarify - I am using a wired connection.