Control distribution of frames amongst nodes

Deadline
1

Is it possible to gain control over how the frames are grouped amongst the nodes beyond simply setting ChunkSize ?

What I have is a large set of frames which needs to be grouped and distributed for processing. Imagine a set of 100 frames and 0-5, 6-14, 15-43 etc need to processed together. It’s not as simple as X amount of frames per group. The grouping can be determined by quickly scanning over the input frames and the grouping is deterministic.

The first idea that occurs to me is handle it on the submission side. I can scan the input frames in submission script, etc and then submit a job for each chunk, or something to that extent.

The reason I’m making this post is I’m relatively new to deadline and just want to make sure I’m not missing a really obvious solution to this problem? Like some kind of script or function that runs in order to determine how to break the work up, etc.

Thanks in advance,
Andrew.

2

If you’d like to know everything there is to know about frame ranges check out this blog post. The issue is that that’s going to be used to create a list of frames to render, then that number will be divided by your chunksize. And that’s set per job submission so you can’t have a task of 5 frames, a task of 8 frames and a task of 28 frames as would be ideal here.

For your workflow I like the separate jobs idea, just submit them all with the same ‘Batch Name’ and they’ll be grouped nicely in the Monitor for you.