I'm trying to set up mantra with backburner to get some rendering done over our farm. That's the end goal anyway.
However, to do so I need to create IFDs for Mantra to render, and this process is a really significant bottleneck in the whole process because 1. The IFD creation is very slow and apparently single threaded, and 2. The IFD file size is quite significant.
While I can live with the file sizes, the real killer here is the workflow of having to have one machine create IFDs, which on my current shot takes approximately thirteen hours. Does anyone know why this extremely important step seems to be single threaded? To make this process feasible at all I had to use hbatch to manually open up ten copies of the scene (each eating RAM) and split up the IFD creation between them.
So, is there something I'm missing here? Are there some tools to make this process less painful? This is the first thing in Houdini that has frustrated me

Edit: I don't think I can make the IFD creation any quicker, as the geometry is dynamic, so different on every frame.