AfterEffects 2015.3 - Does not close on successful render

Deadline
1

Hello

We have recently migrated from CS6 to CC2015.3 and we are suffering from network rendering with Deadline 8.0.9.1

We have 2 mains problems :

  • Some task doesn’t seems to have the informations task end. We have 10 frames / task, the frames are rendered correctly but the job stay in ‘rendering’ doing nothing and not going to another task

Here’s a log of a random bugged task. 1à frames takes ~5min and then nothing…

Interesting thing is : the progress bar in the monitor is stuck to 0% (even on task not bugged, it goes from 0 to 100% in 1s)

  • We have some others task that goes completed imediatly, without rendering anything.
    This time, it looks like a plugin error :

We are rendering on workstation, so we have obviously a Adobe Cloud licence active.
Here, the slave return completed task (instead of fail) and complete all my AE job in minutes…

We also had to update, in the ‘configure plugin’ tab, the path to the .exe of After Effect to a CC2015.3 folder, instead of CC2015.

Finally, some of my graphistes had noticed that, if they keep monitor open, somes changes are not actives in actuals render, so they had to reboot monitor before launching slave ( not really tested, i know that is shouldn’t be the case, but i prefere to report it)

Anybody is using CC2015 here ?

Thanks
-p-

2

La plupart des erreurs ici sont parce que AE a marché en Français (my French is terrible :smiley:)

Because AE is running in a non-english language, the normal safety measures we use to catch problems aren’t matching the output text. For the license problem, I’m guessing it’s the french “Erreur” instead of “Error”. This is also failing to catch when AE doesn’t successfully render since we normally look for the english equivalent of “fin de la composition”.

That said, AE should end on its own… I don’t believe we have provisions in the script to auto-close it. I’m also not sure why you’re hitting licensing issues from the command line. I’d try both renders from the command line if the problem is consistent on certain machines. Info on how to do that is here:
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … oting.html

To test how many features are fixed when running in English, you can just use the “ae_force_english.txt” trick as outlined here:
forums.adobe.com/thread/657200

3

Yea, we were suspicious about the language. Indeed our AE team is working in French.
Unfortunately we have huge amount of expressions that are already linked to the ‘translated name’ of effects.
We will try again, but i think the force_ae_english trick, will render but will break all our comp.

What is disturbing me, is that it was perfectly working on our old project, with CS6 and Deadline 7 and maybe CC2014 + deadline 8 (not sure about this one)

4

Hmm… I wonder, what version of 2015.3 are you using? We have an internal issue in the ticket system where someone’s after effects is locking up while running from the command line.

5

We are using lastest cloud : 13.8.1.38

6

Hi,

We are also having issues with After Effects 2015.3. Sometimes the progress stays at 0% in the Monitor, if you open the slave job the stout is updating though. The bigger problem is that sometimes the slaves pick up the job and then just getting stuck at 0% with no errors. I haven’t been able to establish why as some of the slaves render fine, Is there anyway to get more detail on what after effects is trying to do? You can see a section of one of the log files below, it will stay at this point indefinitely if I leave it.

Thanks

Nick

7

Hi back !

So, we tried to translate all our composition in english (~400+ expression) with this script : aescripts.com/expressionuniversa … sion/embed
We switch off what didn’t worked.

It seems that it didn’t fix the problem of the stuck tasks

Capture_AE.JPG

The frames are rendered has expected but the task never end.

Here’s the end of the log

Finally, the job rendered in CMD has finished correctly, so i think Adobe may has change something at the render end that Deadline doesn’t catch anymore (since ~2015)

We are, at the moment, trying to render a job with only 1 task, to see if job complete can override task complet, to make the job ending.

Hope it helps !
-p-

EDIT : just saw Weedy message, looks like we are in the same bug. Do you use english or another language ?

8

Hi,

We’re using the english version, I think it’s the same though, version number in Deadline is showing as 13.8.1x38.

Nick

9

FYI, we rendered successfully a job with only 1 task.
We suspect that AE+deadline keep something bad in cache between 2 task… but no real clue about it except that we had renderTime going higher and higher on task until freeze.

10

ok, we launch severals jobs in 1 task, and some rendered fine, some get stuck.
Seems that there’s a random bug or don’t know what.

By the way, frames ALWAYS render fine, it’s just that the slave doesn’t understand that the task is finished.

11

Well, that’s the funny thing about simple plugins (the class of Plugin that After Effect’s support is written in). It knows that the render is done when After Effects closes itself. The Slave is a bit too kind on that application if never exits, the Slave just lets it sit there.

Now, if AE is going to be a problem and not close like it’s supposed to, I think it’s time to force it to close after it claims to be finished. That’s fairly easy to do actually. We already have a function named “HandleRenderSuccess” in later 8.0 builds that exists to try and track if the render completed the way it should. It looks like this in “[repo]/plugins/AfterEffects/AfterEffects.py”:

    def HandleRenderSuccess( self ):
        self.RenderSuccess = True

Now, to tell the Slave to mark the task as complete and kill off AE, you change it to this:

    def HandleRenderSuccess( self ):
        self.RenderSuccess = True
        self.ExitWithSuccess()

Make sure the spacing is right. Python gets a bit grumpy if things don’t indent nicely.

If that solves problems for everyone with these new builds, I’ll try and get something added to 8.1 and maybe sweet talk someone into backporting a feature to 8.0.

12

Hum, the idea was good, but doesn’t seems to be enough.

Freezed slave :

While some others slave successfully finished some tasks

Maybe AE is badly returning the end render informations because we miss this on freezed slaves :

13

Deadline is still expecting english unfortunately. Specifically “Render completed successfully”. You could change the text it’s looking for, but that will be difficult to maintain across versions.

I also changed the title of this post (a new thing I’m trying :smiley:) to hopefully direct people to this thread more easily.

14

Hello

Would it be possible to have a temporary workaround for this ?
Actually we have tens of AE jobs to render, and can’t manage it with CMD jobs (and we had dev some events plugins on AE jobs that we need).

A input text / code for Deadline to search of the translated ‘Render completed successfully’ could be ok for me, to unlock this situation.

thanks !
-p-

15

I can Confirm After Upgrading to Deadline 8 SP8 we seem to have problems rendering CC2015 and CC2015.3 jobs.

Have now resorted to rendering cc2015 jobs with cc2014.

16

Okay, this is definitely becoming a problem. I’ll try and talk to the guys here to see if we can patch something. If you don’t hear from me in a few days, please chase me for it.

For @pingus, change this line in your “[repo]/plugins/AfterEffects/AfterEffects.py” in addition to those changes before:

From:
self.AddStdoutHandlerCallback( ".*Finished composition.*" ).HandleCallback += self.HandleRenderSuccess
To:
self.AddStdoutHandlerCallback( ".*fin de la composition.*" ).HandleCallback += self.HandleRenderSuccess

You’ll still hit some problems with progress and other bits, but it’ll get you passed this one.

17

FYI, we are rendering CC2015.3 jobs over CC2014 (dual installation, plugins copied) after a relink in the Configre plugins path, and every things seems ok for the moment.
Multi task, non english render engine, custom AE events working fine.

This can be a workaround in waiting an upgrade.

-p-

18

Hi guys,

An important question. Do your render machines which display this ‘hanging’ at end of render issue, have a public internet connection or not? If they do have a public internet connection is it direct or does it go through a proxy?

This is somewhat experimental, but it seems to be making a difference to my AE render jobs. YMMV.

Whenever you get 1 or more machines hanging with AfterEffects having successfully rendered the frames, printed out a line stating: “Finished composition” or “fin de la composition” (if running in French) but importantly, AE is refusing to close even though things are looking fine here…Try this…

[DISCLAIMER]
This is experimental. Don’t go getting upset if it accidentally blows up your machine. I doubt it, but you never know…

  1. Open Task Manager or Activity Manager (if on OSX)
  2. Look for process called: “AdobeIPCBroker”, right-click and kill it (End Task).
  3. Does AE come back to life and exit and therefore, Deadline ‘completes’ the job?

Note, “AdobeIPCBroker” process will automatically restart everytime you kill it (like a few seconds later) as another process (service/daemon) will auto restart it. However, this seems to be enough, to just give the AE process a bit of a poke and tell it to wake up and finish it’s business.

If by chance this works amazingly well, update your “AfterEffects.py” plugin file like this and please provide feedback!

(Please try the manual instructions above first ~as we need to prove this is actually making a difference, instead of hitting it with an ever increasing bigger hammer until something happens) :laughing:

EDIT:

“<your_repo>/plugins/AfterEffects/AfterEffects.py”

In the function:

def HandleRenderSuccess( self ): self.RenderSuccess = True

update it with an additional line like this:

def HandleRenderSuccess( self ): self.RenderSuccess = True ProcessUtils.KillProcesses( "AdobeIPCBroker" )

19

For information :

  • We rendered jobs 2015.3 with CC2014 after changing plugin Render Executable.
    Works during 1 or 2 weeks fine, but with the recent Cloud Update, freezed task bug came back.

  • We’ve tried to kill process AdobeIPCBroker manually a slave that rendered frames but didn’t finished the task => No effect
    (and yes all AE render slave have internet access, no proxy but standard business network)

  • I’ve finally, as you advice, change the callBack in french => Work fine for the moment (for 2 days ^^) so we are back on CC2015.3

From: self.AddStdoutHandlerCallback( ".*Finished composition.*" ).HandleCallback += self.HandleRenderSuccess To: self.AddStdoutHandlerCallback( ".*fin de la composition.*" ).HandleCallback += self.HandleRenderSuccess

20

ok, thanks for the feedback.

This is very interesting!

Try updating your “HandleRenderSuccess” function to look like this in your AfterEffects.py plugin:

def HandleRenderSuccess( self ): self.RenderSuccess = True ProcessUtils.KillProcesses( "AdobeIPCBroker" ) ProcessUtils.KillProcesses( "Adobe CEF Helper" ) self.ExitWithSuccess()

If you find another stuck AE process as per before, then have a look in Task Manager for any of these processes by name and try killing them off one at a time and see if it helps release the stuck AE process?

Creative Cloud process
Adobe CEF Helper
Adobe Desktop Service
AdobeIPCBroker
Adobe Installer
AdobeUpdateService
AdobeServiceInstaller
CreativeCloud(URIHandler)
AAM Updates Notifier
CCLibrary
node
CoreSync

Finally, after testing all of the above, try just removing this app on a machine or two and see if that helps at all?

helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/ … p-app.html

I really wish I could reproduce this issue locally. Sorry for all the testing notes!