Hi,
We’re trying to render After Effects jobs from our Mac Edit Suite to our PC renderfarm. I’ve installed Deadline 5.1 because to try and resolve this issue of mapped paths because the nature of our file structure doesn’t allow us to store all footage in subfolders of the after effects project. I submitted the job as a .aepx file but it’s still not remapping the footage files but it doesn’t error even though it renders with missing footage ( it’s not set to ignore missing footage ) so I can’t see if it’s struggling because it’s not remapping the drives correctly (it does remap the output file correctly).
I’ve attached the job report but it doesn’t really seem to have anything that really indicates what’s happened.
Any suggestions on how I can resolve this or how I can work out what’s going wrong would be greatly appreciated!
Nick
AfterFX_JobReport.logReport (5.86 KB)
Hi Nick,
Based on the log, nothing in the aepx file is getting mapped. Are you able to zip up and post the aepx file you’re trying to render? If you can post that, along with a screen shot of your path mapping settings, we can take a look to see what the problem might be.
If you’re not comfortable posting that information here, you could email it to support@thinkboxsoftware.com. Just remember to zip up the aepx file so our ticket system doesn’t reject it.
Thanks!
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for the quick response, I’ve emailed through my test file to see if you can work out what’s going on. It’s only a simple file with 1 piece of footage.
Cheers
Nick
Was there a solution for this? I may be running into the exact same problem. Thanks.
I haven’t had a chance to test it yet but I believe this was fixed in the latest release of Deadline. Apparently the mapping wasn’t working from Mac to PC.
Nick
To recap I was seeing missing footage but not getting missing footage errors.
My solution: I had the mapped paths setup (submitting to Deadline from a Mac and rendering on Windows) as /Volumes/share to \192.168.0.100\share which worked for Deadline 4. I had to set up mapped drives (so m: mapped to \192.168.0.100\share) for the Windows machines and then setup the mapped path as /Volumes/share to m: (for example).
All is well now.
V
Hi,
So I’ve tested this on our system finally. It does work but it’s not quite right still. When switching paths from Mac to PC it doesn’t seem to change the / to a . This is a bit of a problem when you’re not using mapped drives for windows.
For example, when we switch the Mac path from “/Volumes/” to “\192.168.0.100” the result is “//192.168.0.100/” which renders with missing footage. Unfortunately it also doesn’t seem to error when set to fail on missing footage.
Instead I’ve had to set each path up to switch “/Volumes/RENDERS” for “R:” which seems to handle the /
This is a bit of a problem when some machines seem to drop their mapped drives and we’re handling that by swapping it out for the actual machines IP address.
Is it possible to make it switch all / for \ when converting from Mac to PC?
Cheers
Nick
Hi Nick,
Thanks for the update. This should be a simple fix that you can do on your end for now. Go to \your\repository\plugins\AfterEffects and open AfterEffects.py in a text editor. Look for this line:
CheckPathMappingInFileAndReplace( sceneFilename, self.TempSceneFilename, ("\\","platform=\"MacPOSIX\""), ("/","platform=\"Win\"") )
Just swap the path separator characters that are getting replaced, like this:
CheckPathMappingInFileAndReplace( sceneFilename, self.TempSceneFilename, ("/","platform=\"MacPOSIX\""), ("\\","platform=\"Win\"") )
That should fix the problem. Let us know if this works and we’ll include the fix in the next 5.1 update.
Thanks!
Scratch that! That’s going to screw up the tag slashes in the XML file. We’re not sure how to workaround this at this point, other than using mapped drives… 
OK, I’ll change it back. Although it did seem to be working…
Oh, really? Hmm, we’ll take a closer look then. If it was working, then you can probably change it back. We just assumed it would screw up the xml slash, but maybe we were wrong…
I think I’ll have to check it again tomorrow to be sure. The pc to pc jobs are working and they use the path remapping to remove mapped drives…
Here’s a line of code that should work fine, and not screw up the slash in the tag:
CheckPathMappingInFileAndReplace( sceneFilename, self.TempSceneFilename, ("/","platform=\"MacPOSIX\"","\\>"), ("\\","platform=\"Win\"","/>") )
We are simply swapping > with /> after swapping / with . Seems to work fine. 
Cheers,
So I just need to change the line I original changed with this new one instead?
Nick