This is a repost from the old Advisory Board:
Frost is nearing the end of it’s beta phase [or at least one can hope!] and some other developments are moving forward. As we are all under NDA - and this stuff i want to keep secret - i wanted to share that we have 2 additions to deadline 5.0 in the ‘pipe’ post release. First up, is Shotgun support. if anyone on the board is currently using shotgun, i would love to hear from you now. We are designing this to not be shotgun-specific, so if you aren’t running shotgun and have some other database integration in mind - let us know that also.
Second is “Arsenal” - an add-on to deadline- which is pretty dang cool, i think. That’s a post-renderer toolkit to do things to your image you so carefully rendered on the farm using deadline and your favourite renderer. First thing, will be the ability to convert, crop/resize, add text etc. Think of it as a built-in slate/template mechanism, that you can script to and access from your submission, or from wherever [read database above]. If you guys are interested in that, beta is a ways away - but i would love to hear some positive [or negative feedback] on this!
Beyond that, we have a new version of Krakatoa in the pipe, as well as some other fun things but i want to gauge the interest on other topics before we jump too far ahead of ourselves and get into detail on that
SO!
Any interest in superior mesh support between your favourite 3D program and 2D program? We have a converter we have used that supports a number of applications that we feel might be interesting. it is very narrow - eg. no cameras etc as opposed to FBX being wide in scope - but its more robust, stable and accurate imho to get assets into and outof and shared between your fave pipelines. Cold? warm? Hot?
i have more things to ask about - but i think this particular thread is long enough…
cb
February 11, 2011 | Thinkbox Software
I’m not using Shotgun but its gaining popularity and it would be wise to investigate how Qube! implemented their support for this technology. It would also be worth considering the semi-secret other project of Shotgun Software, namely; their asset management, TANK solution as a couple of large studios are already heavily using it as I understand (DD, I think). I guess in the future, if successful, we will see communication from asset management tools to shot/sequence/show/project management tools which in turn will both want to communicate with the likes of Deadline. Although potentially, opening up a silly amount of support, I like the idea of Deadline directly supporting certain, defined playback viewers which in turn can then talk to a pipeline tool such as Shotgun and then during say, review of an image sequence, allow a user to select certain frames to be re-submitted to Deadline for re-rendering. Perhaps this is actually relatively easy to expand support for, by building a more customisable command line argument driven Deadline custom viewer executable paths setup. Something like RV player could then be configured to execute deadlinecommand.exe for re-submission of frames, etc.
Arsenal sounds good. Full multichannel-EXR file format support sounds very logical as an initial step together with the usual suspects, such as jpeg, tif, png, tga. Something that came up the other day, is the lack of tools for image conversion to Flash SWF which anyone rendering for the web would generally want to convert to at some point. Yep, I checked out tools like ImageMagik - no support and open-source tools such as SWFTools, but this introduces some compression on higher-res images which was nasty. I think our dev. team ended up using a .NET library to implement a tool? Need to check. The idea of a SLATE/template mechanism sounds most awesome. Obviously, being able to really customise this per studio, with its own logo/text/frame counter/time code/extra info in various corners, left/right justified, centered, file-names, sequence info, colour space/LUT info all jump to mind as being sought after by a user. Combine this with ‘actions’ such as auto-re-size to known film size formats and indeed allow for custom size settings and auto-compile as a Quick-time would be useful. In fact, last week someone brought up again the issue of Quick-time not supporting reading EXR files! How about something to solve this issue in Arsenal?
Superior mesh support? We use FBX to transfer between Max & Maya. Works ok for us, as long as we pay attention to always matching the FBX file format versions to the particular release version of 3dsMax/Maya we are using in production. I’ve been told that Autodesk is throwing quite a bit of cash in the whole inter-file 3D operability scene at the moment. FBX supports cameras and materials reasonably well. We are keen to standardise on FBX as our 1 external file format when it comes to moving between 3D apps and 2D, ie: Nuke. However, if a better offer would come along, then we would always consider our options 
Mike
February 13, 2011 | Mike Owen
What would Arsenal do that running a Fusion/Nuke/Composite job wouldn’t?
Mesh interchange is super important to us. FBX is a closed format, and does not work. Everything else is limited in one way or another. And having the right clients for the applications is critical. We’ve used Realflow .bin files to move meshes around solely because we know anyone can download the tools to load the meshes into their application. It’s not ideal for a number of reasons though. Alembic sounds promising, and supposedly has a lot of support, but who knows if that’s going to really happen. We don’t need cameras, lights, modifiers, rigs, materials, etc. Just mesh sequences with lots of arbitrary vertex data. Speed and compactness will be key, and it just needs to work. Kinda like how PRT’s help with particles.
February 14, 2011 | Chad Capeland
Chad -
in reference to your note about ‘Arsenal’ - my feeling is as follows:
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why commit a fusion/nuke license for rendering templates, resizing/cropping, creating jpegs or whatever. seems overkill for a simple application.
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because of the scripted nature of the access, i can imagine all sorts of interesting things you could do with it along the way. my first goal would be to expose some useful and common requirements directly in the submission dialogue.
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this begins to allow more pipeline creation directly in core - eg a script in your favourite database or asset manager could be triggered by a PA to rerender an asset in deadline with a different template, without having to go through fusion or nuke, and all of the effort to train that PA to use those applications and make their own templates. Seems much simpler to be able to click on the asset in shotgun, change a date, or asset name and have that auto create the resulting quicktime or jpeg imho.
just some thoughts…
cb
February 14, 2011 | Thinkbox Software
Ease of use is a perfectly valid feature. The license one, I’m not so sure, since once the template is made, the actual rendering is done with a render license, which probably is in the same cost league as Arsenal would be, but can be used to render regular comps, too. And if you need to do something Arsenal can’t do, you might wish you could hop onto your interactive license of Fusion/Nuke and slug in whatever was needed.
Wacky idea… is there a market for tools for fusion/nuke/composite that would work with Deadline? Like could you sell “premium” templates and submission scripts? If you did a survey, I bet you’d find that >90% of active DL users have at least one of those applications.
February 15, 2011 | Chad Capeland
1 Nuke render node license + 1 year’s worth of subs (software updates) is $400. Nuke render-node licenses are not cheap and as a result, they are in high demand in our studio. Any cheaper (free Deadline plugin?) solution for basic operations such as fast, automatic file conversion will be sought after? Our Nuke GUI licenses are in even more demand! I’ve seen bust-ups just cause an artist couldn’t get a NukeX instead of a std Nuke license!
February 15, 2011 | Mike Owen
Yikes. Fusion’s render node cost is listed at $250 with no subscription costs. Not that we’ve ever paid for render nodes, they keep tacking them onto our quotes as a means to sweeten the deal. I assume Composite is even cheaper, though I don’t know much about how the licensing works. I don’t know how much Arsenal would cost, of course.
Something that could be a selling point for Arsenal may be speed. I image that if it could execute on the repository server per frame faster than a Fusion/Nuke commandline render could even load, that might be interesting. But even so, if all Arsenal was was a tool for executing Fusion/Nuke comps faster than a Fusion/Nuke Deadline job run through Slave, it might be better than the current setup.
February 15, 2011 | Chad Capeland
Lets talk about cost for a second - and please, take this with your best grain of salt and put yourself in my shoes:
First off - what do you think about the price for Deadline? we are cheaper than Qube and Rush, and more than Royal Render. is there room for us to increase the price a little with v5.0? obviously if you are on support, it wont affect you. but what about a $5 per node increase? $10? More? do you think we are too much already? 
Secondly - what about arsenal? it will be licensed separately and we can either include it with deadline [and perhaps justify somewhat a minor price increase], or we can sell it as it’s own license for a modest fee, or…and and this was the answer mulling around in my mind - that it is included with the support/maintenance fee - eg. it is a ‘subscirption’ and if you are off support, then it no longer functions. we could, in this case, offer it for ‘sale’ but i would prefer it to be a bonus and incentive for people to be on subscription.
thoughts?
cb
February 15, 2011 | Thinkbox Software
I think Rush is cheaper. But frankly, I’m not sure anyone really looks at the price that closely so long as you are in the right neighborhood. We’re more concerned with what it does and how it helps our business. It’s a tiny slice of our budget, but we rely on it a lot. So for me, the price isn’t a factor so much as maintaining current on the application support and features and providing good performance and such. And we still think Krakatoa could be a loss leader to push more Deadline licenses. Nothing justifies render nodes quite like Krakatoa. We might get crankier about bugs or feature requests if the subscription price went up. Give and take. But if it means we GET those features, then that would be awesome.
Include Arsenal for new licenses and charge more? Sounds good. Would Arsenal be enough to win customers for Deadline just as a headline feature? It might be compelling, and new customers might not notice the price change. Offer a small window for subscription renewal to get it free? Dunno how many of your clients are off subscription. The idea of it lapsing (but Deadline not) if you stop support (essentially turning Arsenal into a rental) does sound like a clever idea to encourage subscription renewal.
If you charge separately for Arsenal, I can’t see anyone needing 50 licenses of Deadline and 50 licenses of Arsenal. You would expect that you’d only need a handful of Arsenal licenses, right? So you’d need to make Arsenal expensive. If you were to just tack Arsenal onto Deadline for cheap or even free just to justify a price bump, what happens if someone JUST wants Arsenal? Like they buy Deadline+Arsenal for $220 (with 1 year support) and just get a distributed watermarking / format conversion system? Would that make any sense for you, considering the support load they might generate? Maybe if they later come back and add more licenses since they already have it working? Could Arsenal push Deadline adoption the way that Krakatoa can?
- Chad
February 15, 2011 | Chad Capeland
Good points. To clarify - Rush is slightly cheaper in North America [1 - 100 $150 per machine ] and slightly more in the rest of the world [1-100 $190 per machine] so we are both right!
i agree regarding your last point, although i see arsenal in exactly that way - if a large facility wants to buy arsenal and one seat of deadline, then so be it. but now we have 1 seat in the facility, and pretty soon that one slave trying to render all templates and watermarks is going to be overtaxed, so they’ll add 9 more. then we have 10 seats…and hey, thats a foot in the crack of the door
okay, thanks for the feedback. anyone else want to chime in? chad, any other thoughts?
cb
February 15, 2011 | Thinkbox Software
I like the idea of Arsenal only being available for subs based users. Build up the annual subs user base with more extra features
February 16, 2011 | Mike Owen
I’m being absolutely serious when I say this; I’m in favor any unique pricing scheme. The more convoluted it is, the more likely I can convince the money people that it’s worth doing. It’s actually how my company prices out projects for our clients. “So the only way we can buy this product is to buy another product from the same company, one that we already have?” “No, we only have to pay a small increase in the annual subscription for the product we already have in order to get another product for free!” “And the subscription does what?” “Encourages them to fix stuff that’s broken.” “Stuff we broke or they broke?” “Doesn’t matter, we’re already paying it, just check your records for a ‘Prime Focus’, only this time make the check out to ‘Thinkbox Software’.” “Fine, are you done yet?”
February 16, 2011 | Chad Capeland
Holy crap, Shotgun has a really bold pricing model. Sure it only costs $89 to get it up and running, but it would cost us something like $85,000 a year to actually use it. Maybe project/resource management is what Thinkbox should look into. There’s apparently lot of money in that.
February 23, 2011 | Chad Capeland
In my travels, I almost thought I had stumbled over what Arsenal sounds like its going be like:
cgru.sourceforge.net/utilities/doc/index.html
Luckily , the Deadline UI is slightly easier to use than this beast!:
cgru.sourceforge.net/afanasy/doc/afanasy.html
And finally, Blur Studios seem to have beaten you to the use of the name, Arsenal:
code.google.com/p/arsenalsuite/
with their own in-house rendering system. Perhaps a different name might be an idea?
Just a few thoughts
Mike
March 16, 2011 | Mike Owen
Hi,
Just to add to my previous post regarding Arsenal functionality, I think this link is a good example of the kind of thing I would expect to see in such a post-job image handling system, but of course with more polish
cgru.sourceforge.net/utilities/doc/index.html
This is open-source, so you can see how the various elements have been put together by downloading the project!
Mike
May 3, 2011 | Mike Owen