After Effects stalling

Deadline
1

So I ‘think’ I followed everything right with respect to submitting an AE job. Can someone verify this is right? The machine start the renders with no errors, but don’t render anything. They just sit there ‘rendering’. No frames are showing up in the save folder. All folders are network acessible, etc. again no errors upon startup. Everything is green and good to go, but nothing is produced. I’ve tried it with just one machine, same issue. I’ve left the machines for up to 45 minutes and nothing happens. The processes show up in task manager, but have 0% CPU usage.

Render nodes are Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard,
24 GB Ram
24 cores
AE CS5 (we don’t have 5.5 at all, in fact no other versions of Adobe products installed).
Deadline 5.1 submitted via Submit to Deadline script from AE interface with only 1 comp in render queue. Also tried submitting via DL monitor directly. No luck.

Sorry if this is fixed elsewhere in another post. I found a post on a ‘similar’ topic in that the machines weren’t producing anything and have the settings that were suggested in that post. I created a new topic as this may be a different issue. Being as I’m a DL noob, I probably am missing a check box somewhere.

Thanks in advance!

AfterEffects.png
AfterEffects.png508×881 65.4 KB

Advanced.png
Advanced.png508×881 55.7 KB

General.png
General.png508×881 61.3 KB

2

What executable are you using for rendering? Deadline needs to use aerender.exe, which is AE’s command line renderer. If you have it set to AfterFX.exe, that could explain the problem.

You can change the executable in the Plugin Configuration, which you can access from the Tools menu in the Monitor while in super user mode.

Cheers,

  • Ryan
3

Thanks for the reply, Ryan!

Yeah, I have it pointing to aerender.exe in the CS5 support folder and not the AfterFx.exe. (Specifically, “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CS5\Support Files\aerender.exe”). I removed all other lines in the plugin config dialog, so that’s the only one in there. I’ve restarted those machines and the same thing happens. I verified it at least renders something by submitting a max job and that rendered fine. I know that’s apples and oranges, but I at least was able to make sure that worked correctly. :slight_smile:

Here’s what the slaves say:

I also tried submitting a couple jobs with only 5-10 frames and does the same thing.

Thanks for the help!

-Chip

EDIT: Removed some data

4

Thanks for confirming! The next step is to confirm if this is a Deadline problem or an AE problem. On one of your render nodes that the problem is occurring on, open a command prompt and run this command:

"C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CS5\Support Files\aerender.exe" -project "\\kchw10\Projects\Post\Sequence.aep" -comp "Seq_Final" -s 136 -e 270 -output "\\kchw10\Projects\Frames\Finals\Seq\Seq_Final_[#####].jpg"

This is the exact same command that Deadline is running. If it also hangs, then we know that something is wrong with AE.

Cheers,

  • Ryan
5

OK, that doesn’t do anything either. So apparently it’s an AE problem. Hrm… :frowning:

All I get in the prompt is:

Then when I quit it:

Awesome… lol!

Thanks for the help anyway!

EDIT: I decided to try running the render engine with UI to see if it will even load. So far it’s hanging on “Initializing Media Core”, so there’s something up with a codec or something. Good times!

6

Ok, that was definitely the problem. Yay! :smiley:

I went to: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CS5\Support Files(Media Core plug-ins)\Common and just started removing to an unassociated folder all the ‘prm’ files, leaving the dlls, and leaving the exporter plugins aside from the quicktime one as we don’t have QT installed on the nodes.

Now they’re flying through! Took 15 minutes to render the sequence to frames compared to over an hour and a half on my one machine. The good thing is, it was fast enough that I could go back and look at the frames and I found I apparently had some maps not mapped in the max file right. lol! At first I thought it was maybe and error with it writing the files to disk, but nope, it was still wrong in the initial comp as well.

I have a question about something different that I’m wondering if DL can do, can I PM you Ryan, or do you have an email address I can contact you at?

Thanks for your help!

-Chip