What is the process to set this up? Are there any instructions? Thanks!
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … uping-jobs

Hello,

There are a few ways to change this. Usually it’s done by selecting all the jobs for the batch, right clicking to open the job properties, and then enter the name in the Batch Name field of the General window. If you are doing this via manual submission or scripting, you would use the flag BatchName.

Cool, thanks. Is there a way for the end user to assign a batch name to a job as it is submitted? We are trying to group jobs based on a billing number assigned to each project.

Hello,

While we do not have this option currently, I will definitely pass this suggestion along. In the meantime, you could code your own addition to the submitter(s) you need. The variable you would be looking to define is BatchName, and it shouldn’t be too hard to code in a field for this into the submitter if you have a python coder on staff.

Can I ask for which application submitter(s) this request is for? Is this for the Monitor submitter and/or the in-app submitter?

Quite a few of the submitters have already had the [BatchName=""] entry added to it’s submitter in Deadline v7.1, so what you’re asking for, may well already be available in our beta version.

I have just submitted a request on your behalf to expose “Job.JobBatchName” job property to our Script API, so more fancy interception can be carried out in say, a Python job event plugin or general Deadline Python script.

HI, i will respond for Jared, he is working on other stuff and may have missed this reply.

it is the Max submitter that we want to put a 5 digit number in for the batch.
this would group our jobs by project and if we have access to the batch name in the stats I can do better analysis on our render time by job or customer.

thanks!

FYI.

This is now done and will first appear in v7.1 beta 4 and later.

So, here’s the thing…we kind of assumed that most users submitting via the in-app submitters will want a certain amount of automatic intelligence in how the [BatchName=“something”] will be applied to any place where multiple jobs are submitted. Let’s look at the case of 3dsMax & submission via SMTD. There are many places where there is multiple job submission and batching makes sense - tile, rtt, quicktime, single-region jigsaw, multi-region jigsaw, animation jigsaw and probably a couple more that slip my mind, late on a friday evening

So, we assumed, that having automatic grouping “BatchName” would be useful and perhaps instead, when users need to track all the possible different types of job submissions coming out of SMTD and then want to combine it with say, tracking all the jobs from AE, Nuke, Maya, etc BUT are all related by say, Project, or Sequence or shot, etc, that users might like to track them by using the extensible “ExtraInfoX” metadata fields, especially, as the first 0-9 are viewable in the monitor (and sortable, etc).

These “ExtraInfoX” columns in Monitor are available in SMTD as well under the “Shotgun/Draft” tab, which incidentally needs to be renamed in the docs!
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … -draft-tab

An outstanding wishlist item, is to expose these ExtraInfoX entries to an external maxscript file, where you could populate these fields with custom info such as “ProjectID”, etc. Bear in mind, these columns of data are also available in the Farm Reports (stats) system as well.

Thoughts?

This sounds good. Just to clarify, with the next beta release we would have the ability to add this function to the submission script on our own, allowing the end users to add the batch description at the time of submission? Thanks for all your help.

The next beta release is just about to walk out the door, so it would probably make our next dev. sprint.
Feel free to join up to the Deadline v7.1 beta program if it’s something you would like to get early access to?
Email beta [at] thinkboxsoftware [dot] com for the NDA.

Maxscript customisation of the extra info columns actually just made it into beta 4, so depending on how you store your billing number per project, you can use maxscript to retrieve this billing number and inject it into one of the extra info columns automatically at submission time.