After Effects CC output format changing?

Joel_LeLievre · January 17, 2014, 1:12pm

I am having some issues rendering comps out of AE CC where the output format seems to default to .avi even though I specify a .png sequence. (Even when I view the job through the DL Monitor (6.1.0.54343 R), and view the job properties, the output reads .png sequence.) Any ideas as to why this might be happening?
RenderLog.txt (18 KB)

rrussell · January 17, 2014, 2:48pm

It looks like Deadline is passing everything correctly to AE, so we’ll need to confirm if this is a Deadline specific issue or a general AE one.

Open a command prompt on the machine that originally rendered the job and run this command:

"C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CC\Support Files\aerender.exe" -project "C:\Projects\BannockBurn\Shots\025\SC025_01\2d\AE\scenefiles\Adobe After Effects Auto-Save\SC025_01_v008 auto-save 9.aep" -comp "SC025_03_MASTER" -s 1 -e 305 -output "C:\Projects\BannockBurn\Shots\025\SC025_03\2d\AE\output\v001\SC025_03_JL_v001_[####].png"

If you see the same problem, then at least we can rule out Deadline as the culprit.

Thanks!
Ryan

Joel_LeLievre · January 17, 2014, 2:58pm

Thanks for the quick reply Ryan. I did as you suggested and it appears to be an AE issue as it once again changes from .png format to .avi. I am going to poke around and see if I can find out why this is happening.

Thanks again!

Joel_LeLievre · February 14, 2014, 5:32pm

I continue to get issues when rendering Quicktimes out of AE CC from some reason. It seems to be hit or miss and when it doesn’t render quicktimes, it renders out the default settings for .avi file instead. I am wondering if it might be the Quicktime codec being used, which happens to be DNxHD. Might this have some influence on the Deadline/After Effects communication?

rrussell · February 14, 2014, 5:41pm

Have you brought up this problem with Adobe? I think we had previously ruled out Deadline as the cause of this issue, since you can reproduce it from a command prompt outside of Deadline. That’s a test case that you could give to Adobe that reproduces the problem.

All Deadline is doing when rendering with AE is launching AE’s command line renderer and waiting for it to complete. Maybe the bug is simply in AE’s command line renderer…

Cheers,
Ryan

im_thatoneguy · February 15, 2014, 5:35pm

Do some machines perhaps not have DNxHD installed? Could it be defaulting to AVI when the quicktime codec settings are ‘impossible’ to render?