I suspect the source of this problem isn’t Deadline itself, but it may have a fix and I’m hoping at least that other people here have come across this problem.
We’ve had some renders start from frame 0 instead of frame 1, but this happens with all the batches in a given job.
So instead of 1-32 we get frames 0-31, 33-64 becomes 32-63 etc.
Frame 0 is just rendered as a blank black image, since the actual comp doesn’t have anything on frame zero, and this leaves us short a frame at the end. This is only happening with some of our renders. But when we check the compositions in After Effects they are actually set to start on frame 1, not zero.
Our concern now is there might be some other hidden setting somewhere overwriting this, or that these files are somehow losing this information and then the renderers are defaulting back to frame 0. Has anyone come across this or found a way to stop it? Ideally we could have an argument on the commandline to explicitly set the start frame, but I haven’t found anything like that.
Best guess is that we’re not capturing the starting frame correctly in the submitter and since most people start at frame zero (or, I do at least) that we haven’t noticed.
Usual almost-automated response: Can you provide a sample AE project with no external dependencies that shows this problem? Some simple text effect or similar would be perfect. Also, can you check on those existing jobs and see if task 0 is starting from frame 0 or frame 1?
I think it might be a bit weirder than that. In the repository Deadline is displaying the correct 1-32 frame range. And the command line call that Deadline is using has the correct start and end frame, but After Effects numbers everything down.
So a call like this:
2018-04-25 12:09:00: 0: INFO: Executable: "C:/Program Files/Adobe/Adobe After Effects CC 2017/Support Files/aerender.exe"
2018-04-25 12:09:00: 0: INFO: Rendering to network drive
2018-04-25 12:09:00: 0: INFO: Argument: -project "X:\13_composite\ptc112\ptc112_setup_I\ptc112_setup_I.aep" -OMtemplate png -RStemplate full -comp "ptc112_sc061" -s 97 -e 128 -output "X:\14_sub_edit\ptc112\10_comp_png\ptc112_sc061\ptc112_sc061_[#####]"
Actually exports frames 96 to 127 instead of the explicitly start and stop being given here.
Hmm. My AE install is a little broken at the moment.
I wonder if After Effects has an option to re-number frames. I did some Googling last week and came up with this weird one from 7 years ago: forums.adobe.com/thread/840643
That thread sounds similar to what’s happening here, but we have already set up after effects to use “Use Comp Frame Number”, and it doesn’t seem to be working for us.
Actually, my mistake here for not asking sooner, but what version of AE is this happening on? I’m going to see if I can leverage someone else’s install to run this test.
Maybe it’s helpful for you to get some more details about our environment. We are working with AE CC17 and CC18 on Win 8.1 Machines, Deadline version is 10, as far as I know.
I have also checked the hints in the adobe forum thread stated above. Here with us everything is set up as recommended there.
Did anyone fix that render issue? Do you have a recommendation for me, what to do?
I have to assume there is either some secret setting in a comp somewhere or there’s a deep deep bug in AE no one’s ever figured out. Considering @gary rand it from the command line and it still renumbered the frames, I’m not sure.
Another angle, if I were to make a setting to renumber things, I’d personally put it at the comp level. What happens if you delete all compositions and re-recreate them with output settings? I don’t know if AE stores option defaults, but if it affects only a few AE projects just save a backup and mess around with the settings.
