Hi,

I noticed at least since the upgrade (6.2.0.26 R), copying and pasting info from Tasks (and other locations, but I’ll focus on Tasks) has become completely numeric, which then adds another few steps to make it human readable.

For my purposes, the data is being pasted in to Excel.

Task Time
956273
956273

Most humans don’t inherently understand milliseconds, so this information is useless to pass on to a coordinator or producer or artist. I can make a formula in a spreadsheet of course, but why take a feature of Deadline a step backwards?

The worst part is Peak RAM, which is absolutely essential information for rendering.

Peak RAM Usage
22810308608
22810308608

It does me little good now. For example, the information I’m trying to organize and analyze in a spreadsheet, correlation between maxing out RAM and time it took to render, this column has just become useless to me.

I need to know how much RAM the machine has total to tell if that has any impact on the task time. A task that says 21.244 GB (67%) and took 15:56 tells me that it isn’t using all of the RAM on the machine. A task that took 956273 and used 22810308608 RAM tells me…that it could have been on a machine that had anywhere from 24GB to infinity GB of RAM, so I still don’t really know, and that’s after either using a calculator or counting the digits to figure out if it’s 2.something or 20something GB.

I understand wanting to standardize the data input in to a spreadsheet, but it’s just backwards to take away the old copy and paste. Obviously, since the interface still says 21.244 GB (67%) instead of 22810308608 you understand this concept.

Sometimes I want to do calculations with the copied and pasted information, but sometimes I just want to quickly copy a few tasks to show a supervisor and not have to take the time to apply a formula to two of the most useful task info columns.

Make a “Human Copy” and “Standardized Copy” if that’s what it takes, but please bring the normal copy back.

I will let others respond to the copy/paste formatting request.

However, your post has me curious about what information you are attempting to analyze with a spreadsheet that Deadline is not directly providing. You mentioned looking for a correlation between RAM and task time. Could you provide any more detail about the context if this analysis? (e.g. Is it job-specific or all jobs?) Also, are there any other conclusions for which you are turning to a spreadsheet to do the analysis?

In a former role of mine, I had a hypothesis that any information being actively tracked on a white board was likely a sign of a deficiency somewhere in the studio pipeline. Similarly, any queue analysis being done in a spreadsheet may be a sign of a usability weakness in Deadline.

For this situation, mostly it is job specific. We sometimes have jobs that can render on, for example, 24GB machines, but peak out RAM, and take 10 hours to render. The next frame might pick up a 64GB machine and render in 1 hour.

The spreadsheet then becomes useful for elimination purposes (we can delete the rows with frames that were rendering a different part of the shot for example, or are otherwise irrelevant)

It is also useful to separate all the frames that rendered on a certain machine, for example, then sort within that, by time or RAM or finish date/time, to see things like the first frame on that machine took 50 minutes total and 20 minutes to startup, but the 3 frames after that took only 30 minutes to render because reload plugin between frames was disabled, and they didn’t have to reload the scene.

Formatting purposes: to highlight certain rows or something like that. Also, we often send an overview of what’s on the farm to producers who would rather look at an email than check on the farm from home.

Another situation is with slaves, modifying pools and groups. We currently have groups based on the RAM of the machine. If we upgrade a number of machines or add machines, it’s more useful to copy and paste the slaves in to a spreadsheet so I can refer to it when Modifying Groups, since I can’t view this info in the Modify Groups window and I can’t manipulate the Slaves list when in the Modify Groups window.

Spreadsheets are editable, and I think that’s the major thing. I can move rows around, delete rows, add blank rows, separate certain things from the rest without having to define a filter.

Thanks for the feedback. In the release version of 6.2, the down-arrow menu in all the lists will now have a Human Readable Copying toggle option that defaults to enabled. If enabled, copying will behave like it did in 6.1. If disabled, then raw numerical data will be copied instead (like it did in later versions of the 6.2 beta). This should keep everyone happy.

Cheers,
Ryan