We are using AE CC 2015 with deadline 7.2 and getting the following error when we try to use concurrent tasks.
2016-04-27 11:38:29: 0: STDOUT: aerender ERROR -609: AESend failed to send apple event at line 769
This is always where the task fails, we’ve tried sample scenes with different content…here’s a longer log.
We feel like something simple must be being missed but we’ve been through all the AE & deadline options & not finding much direction elsewhere online or in previous posts here.
Any ideas appreciated, thanks Thinkbox forums!
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Time Span: Custom
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Start: 00060
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: End: 00120
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Duration: 00060
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Frame Rate: 30.00 (comp)
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Guide Layers: All Off
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Skip Existing Files: Off
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Output Module: PNG 8 Bit No Alpha
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Output To: /Volumes/norender/tempRender/ms/BL_printAD_A_bannerWave_BG_v003/BL_printAD_A_bannerWave_BG_v003[#####].png
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Format: PNG
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Output Info: -
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Start Frame: 60
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Output Audio: -
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Channels: RGB
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Depth: Millions of Colors
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Color: Premultiplied
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Resize: -
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Crop: -
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Final Size: 17280 x 1080
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Profile: -
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Post-Render Action: None
2016-04-27 11:38:23: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS:
2016-04-27 11:38:29: 0: STDOUT: aerender version 13.7.2x3
2016-04-27 11:38:29: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: Launching After Effects…
2016-04-27 11:38:29: 0: STDOUT: PROGRESS: …After Effects successfully launched
2016-04-27 11:38:29: 0: STDOUT: aerender ERROR -609: AESend failed to send apple event at line 769
Hello,
Can you try to run the following command from the terminal on the node that log came from?
“/Applications/Adobe After Effects CC 2015/aerender” -project “/Users/peternigrini/Library/Application Support/Thinkbox/Deadline7/slave/peters-macbook/jobsData/570e7ef210e910136345c1fb/PNStudioTemp.aep” -comp “113-072-C02-WorldDropLines” -s 0 -e 299
Hi Dwight, thanks for reply. I assume we are meant to swap the *temp.aep parth for our own?
Do you know how ‘concurrent’ setting are supposed to be sent, is it an argument for aerender, or something deadline specific or in the aep file?
Hello,
So this is one of those ‘don’t answer when you’re not sure’ type situations. Unfortunately running AE jobs with concurrent tasks has a pretty big issue in that After Effects does not like when more than one instance of aerender is running at a single time. I am not aware of any way, currently, to bypass this problem.
Hi Dwight, It works for us to run them manually via multiple aerender processes in separate terminals on the same machine. We are curious how concurrent exactly is getting handled through Deadline does it essentially do that?
Concurrent tasks definitely starts two AERender processes. The problem that Dwight mentions here is that the way AERender communicates to the child processes it spawns (AERenderCore) can sometimes break, leaving these child processes sitting around and taking up space, and even stranger things happen when the QtHelper crashes. In general, I always recommend not using concurrent tasks with AE and instead enable “use multiprocess” in the submitter instead. AE and 3DS Max are really the only two apps we support that I recommend avoiding concurrent tasks with.
I think your tests were good, but it gets a bit tricky as you’d need to run them in a loop for a few hours to simulate how Deadline is starting and stopping AERender over and over again.
Now, doing some Google searching on that error brought up a lot of different results:
aescripts.com/forums/discussion/ … nderer-pro
Is Deadline running as a service?
This farm is offline for few days but I will do some more tests, what was interesting was it was failing every time in Deadline (with show scene or test scene) but working fine outside with our workaround concurrent workflow throughout show. It would also fail with the first tasks/ no frames rendered. The difference I guess was our ‘concurrent’ workflow were manually launched as their own aerender jobs.
Kind of curious what adobe & deadline is doing with these aerender /aerendercore processes since we got things working reliably in undocumented way but if multiprocess checkbox works that should just be adopted as best practice. To be honest this was kind of run-and-gun project with new team/configs that didn’t take the time to figure everything out during the show. We probably just missed noticing multiprocess checkbox works 
Agreed Google wasn’t helpful with this one.
Not currently running Deadline as service, we did not install as service & were launching the Slave as part of a login script for the render user. Is there a difference?
The issue happens the same with service or not, so changing how the launcher and slave run doesn’t really affect this issue. I don’t know what, if anything, we can or may do in the future, but hopefully we can have it work better in a future build.