After Effects Bugs in Deadline 7.2

Deadline
1

We’ve just upgraded to Deadline 7.2 and are now having issues with the After Effects plugin:

  1. Deadline no longer shows the progress of the render job.

  2. Local rendering no longer seems to have do anything. All jobs are rendering straight onto the server even if this is selected.

Any thoughts on if this is a bug or if there’s something we need to do to fix this? We’re using AE CC 2014 and 2015 and are on Deadline 7.2.0.18.

Thanks

Nick

2

Can I ask what version of Deadline you used before? Does this happen on AE 2015 and 2014? Can you share a job report from each so we can see if there is stuff we should be catching? Thanks.

3

We were on version 7 before, it was only a minor update we installed. It definitely happens in 2014, I’m pretty sure it’s also in 2015. I’ve attached a log file from a 2014 render.

Looking at an old job report from before the update it seems like it’s not registering the local render as it’s missing the line about rendering to the local drive:

The progress update just seems to not be picking up the output from After Effects.
Job_2015-11-12_17-50-16_5644d1586866e2f02876d9f7.txt (61.6 KB)

4

Hello,

So it looks like we made a change at some point so that the integrated submitter doesn’t include the output path as that was breaking things when the comp had multiple output modules. This is a problem because Deadline needs the output path for supporting local rendering. We are going to look at how to better support this and hopefully either include the output path when local rendering is enabled, or display a warning for multiple output modules. We will let you know what we come up with.

5

We have an update on both of these issues:

  1. Progress reporting was only working with timecode-based output. Deadline 7.2.1 (which is currently in beta) will add support for frame-based output (which is what is being used in the log you posted).

  2. For Local Rendering to work properly, you must also enable the Include Output File Path option in the After Effects job submitter (docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … on-options). As Dwight mentioned, we needed to make this optional because otherwise it would break renders for comps that had multiple output modules. We’ll be improving the submitter in 7.2.1 so that the Local Rendering option will be disabled unless Include Output File Path is enabled.

Cheers,
Ryan

6

We are still seeing this behavior in After Effects 2015.2 with Deadline 7.4. Tasks will not update the rendering status even though frames are rendering. In addition, when the task is finished on the slave it does not report close that task and start a new one. We have turned Local rendering off so we at least get the frames on our NAS. With Local rendering turned on the frames were never copied back to the NAS and we would lose them when restarting the tasks.

There seem to be no errors indicating that anything is actually wrong so this has been particularly tricky to troubleshoot.

Any thoughts appreciated.

Vaughn

7

I’ve seen problems with AE not writing any output, but that’s not a common situation.

We’ve just committed some code to improve the file size checking in the AE plugin (it was off by 1024). If you enable that with multi-machine rendering turned off, Deadline should be able to re-queue the tasks that ended up with missing frames. In the next release of Deadline 8.0 we should support deleting zero byte files as well, which should help when After Effects writes empty files.

As for the progress reporting, we should have fixed this. We’ll need the render log to be sure. Can you post the lines from the job report which start with “STDOUT”? We’re looking for lines with the word “progress” in them I believe, but anything that seems to show how far along AE is should be good enough for us.

Also, can you give me the exact version of Deadline you’re using? Is it 7.2.4? We may be able to patch the plugin for you for testing purposes.