Hi all,
I’m using the [STARTFRAME] token in the output filename to get Deadline to append the starting frame into the rendered file’s name. This works as intended where I get back “myFile_00100.mov”. However the error checking pass done post-render is still looking for “myFile_[STARTFRAME].mov” and it fails with Missing Output.
My questions are (1) is this the best way to append a frame number into a quicktime render’s file name, and (2) if so, how do I get the checking pass to see the tokenized name and not the literal name, short of turning off Fail On Missing Output?
Thank you!
How are you submitting the job? If you add a token in the output filename in the renderqueue, the output filename automatically updates and that is how deadline reads it.
Or maybe are you using submit selected layer submission? I did a quick test, and it looks like output name check is based on the startframe of the framelist set in the deadline submitter. eg. I set comp start frame to 100, and in the submitter, I had frame list 100-250.
but never saw anything like “[STARTFRAME]” in the output file name checking…
Here is a sample submission command:
2025-06-06 23:04:48: 0: INFO: Argument: -project “/Path/To/myProject.aep” -comp “myComp_v011” -s 30 -e 59 -output “/Path/To/myMovie_[STARTFRAME].mov” -v ERRORS_AND_PROGRESS -close DO_NOT_SAVE_CHANGES -sound OFF
And this will correctly save to “myMovie_00030.mov” but during error checking it will look for the literal token and return an error
“myMovie_[STARTFRAME].mov does not exist”
Since you have -output set, I will assume you are not submitting from AE, but from either Deadline Monitor with output override or a custom script/extension?
For expected behaviour, I think the token needs to be translated before the deadline submission. It looks like the output file checking just uses the raw untranslated OutputFilename0 parameter in JobInfo .This is why it’s fine when submitting from AE.
Its from AE with a modified deadline submitter, one of the changes was to append the startframe to the render name. Doesn’t seem like I can pre-translate that though because the render is to a sequence of QT files; so there are more than just one.
If it’s from AE, how is the render queue built? Not sure what the modified submitter does, but it will be extendscript jsx, you can easily get the startframe of a comp.
The RQ was created normally using the native AE “Add to Queue” command. The only modification to the Deadline Submitter .jsx was to leverage the Chunks setting to also apply to a Quicktime.
That’s a simplification but it wasn’t really too major of a change - the resulting render would a series of indexed QT segments the duration of the Chunk Size, with the filename index being taken from the [STARTFRAME] token. The existing code conveniently took care of dividing up the comp and all that, so really no more work seemed to be needed. Except the error checking part as covered up-thread.