I know this one isn´t easy to implement…
But having the possibility to have one central “Server instance” of VEAI that distributes part of jobs, whole jobs or encoding out to other machines in the same network would open the doors for bigger production companies / Authoring / rendering…
there are many ways to approach it, some role models could be ripbot (via avisynth), blender and similar, mandelbubler… You probably have more ideas about this than me 
This is a quite interesting idea I mentioned too some weeks ago!
Yes, I think it would come in handy It doesn`t hurt to bring it up once in a while, first time we mentioned it on facebook probably is years ago… anyway, the concept is not revolutionary new, so it´s obvious someone is bringing it up sooner or later
In theory you can order ve ai to save the video to images, test the speed of a second and third pc and then give each of them a certain amount of images to process so they might complete their work all together.
Of course This (and other options) is how its done by some people at the moment…
But thats like giving someone with a 3D Renderfarm for cinematic production the option to manually copy his files over to all PCs, manually adjust the batch sizes, run the benchmarks by hand, etc… Not really “helping” and way to complicated.
One would need at least a simple batch handöing, project / task / etc deployment, recovery and simple report features, scheduling, etc… Those people who know how to fillde this stuff together manually and use it - are never working professionally on stuff like that - this frankensteining is only done for hobby purposes (even if they are professionals) - as soon as semi-pro or above is involved, a solid, robust solution is needed - and “time is money”… For someone cutting his scale/render time down to 25% becaues he/she can use all the workstations in a department over night, they would pay good money for an addition of the network renderer…
Luckily, its not THAT complicated to realise something like that, so at least a robust und reliable solution could be whipped together on a basis of commonly available tools…
of course, that all depends on where topaz wants to go with the tool, whom they want to adress - no one know but topaz (thats fine, its common), so we make suggestions here …
Personally I would love to see it setup something like Davinci Resolve Server. Just setup a central Postgres database that holds the jobs. Then every node accesses that database for its jobs when they are put into Remote Render mode. It should be possible. They can either be directly assigned with a specific Node flag or flag them as Any so that nodes grab them as nodes become available.
I could live with that variant, too Many ways to do it…
