After Effects and Saber

Deadline
1

Hey guys,

It’s me again with the same problem.

We had it already in the past in version 9. An After Effects Job which includes the Saber plugin from VideoCopilot does not finish at the end of the task. All frames are rendered (Local Rendering active) and the task is stuck at 100%.

You guys fixed it the last time with a slightly customized After Effects submission script. Unfortunately, after my Upgrade to version 10 (10.0.16.6) it is back again.

Do you have a tip what I could do to solve that. I know its a free plugin but our operators like to work with it and right now we’ve to prerender everything in order to send it to our farm.

Thanks in advance.

Christian

2

It was a pretty hacky fix. We had problems when people would use different workflows if we killed it too soon, and the effort was pretty extensive. I would really prefer if the VC guys fixed this one, but I think my hacked fix is this:

[attachment=0]AfterEffects.zip[/attachment]

3

Hey Edwin,

Thank you for the quick reply. I’ll give it a try it asap.

Just to clarify, what have the VC guys to do in order to fix it? Maybe I’ll try to get in touch with them to see if it is an easy fix for them.

4

So I’ve tried the new submission plugin… It works with 5 second ‘time-out’ but it skips the moving files part as well. :slight_smile:

2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Render Settings: Best Settings
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Quality: Best
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Resolution: Full
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Size: 1920 x 1080
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Proxy Use: Use No Proxies
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Effects: Current Settings
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Disk Cache: Read Only
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Color Depth: Current Settings
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Frame Blending: On for Checked Layers
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Field Render: Off
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Pulldown: Off
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Motion Blur: On for Checked Layers
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Solos: Current Settings
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Time Span: Custom
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Start: 00070
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  End: 00074
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Duration: 00005
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Frame Rate: 25,00 (comp)
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Guide Layers: All Off
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Skip Existing Files: Off
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Output Module: Lossless
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: INFO: Found file extension 'tif'. Is this a video format? False
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Output To: D:\SlaveLocalData\blade-2d-105\jobsData\5b2bc443de353a36006fc442\AfterEffectsOutput_tempwZF510\CC2017_SABER_[#####].tif
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Format: TIFF Sequence
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Output Info: -
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Start Frame: 70
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Output Audio: -
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Channels: RGB
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Depth: Millions of Colors
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Color: Premultiplied
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Resize: -
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Crop: -
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Final Size: 1920 x 1080
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Profile:  -
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  Post-Render Action: None
2018-06-21 17:30:46:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  
2018-06-21 17:30:47:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  00070 (1): 0 Seconds
2018-06-21 17:30:47:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  00071 (2): 1 Seconds
2018-06-21 17:30:48:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  00072 (3): 1 Seconds
2018-06-21 17:30:49:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  00073 (4): 0 Seconds
2018-06-21 17:30:49:  0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:  00074 (5): 1 Seconds
2018-06-21 17:30:49:  0: INFO: Found 'Finished Composition', waiting 5 seconds then exiting
2018-06-21 17:30:54:  0: Done executing plugin command of type 'Render Task'
2018-06-21 17:30:54:  0: Executing plugin command of type 'End Job'
2018-06-21 17:30:54:  0: Done executing plugin command of type 'End Job'
5

Is there any chance to tweak this hack a little more to use local rendering?

Thanks in advance.

6

I’m actually not sure what Video Copilot need to do, but I can definitely help them get set up with a Deadline farm for testing. I’m sure it’s not just us who are affected by this, so it’ll be worthwhile. No one has had a proper response out of them yet that I’m aware of (I tried myself) so if you can make some headway there I think the community would definitely appreciate it.

As far as the local rendering… Now we’re entering a pretty stuck thing here. The workaround is to gracefully fail the render (bail out without logging an error report) which means the PostTask job work of moving files will never be called. That’s a limitation in the core code and not something I can work around. :confused:

7

Ok, thanks for the explanation.

I’ll give it a try and see if I can reach someone at VideoCopilot.

8

Hey Traid, did you ever get through to anyone there?

9

Hey Edwin,

Sorry for the late reply.

I wrote a request and never got a reply but honestly didn’t follow up on it.

But… we’ve recently updated the whole farm to Windows 10 (1809 / Deadline 10.0.23.4 / AE 16.0.1) and I can confirm that Saber is not an issue anymore. It simply works. Would be interesting why this works out of the box in Windows 10…

Also Videocopilots Vibrance which had same issue in the past is working without a problem.

Maybe this is helpful for someone.

1 Like
10

That is fantastic news! I’m really curious what exactly caused it now… I know we’ve had problems calling into things like the WMIC tools on Windows where it could pause indefinitely. I wonder if it’s related…