Deadline v5.0 introduced a powerful new feature. The “event plugin” architecture. Why is this so useful? What can it do for me? Well…How about this as an example based on the code already supplied in the official Deadline v5.0 manual. Generate a Quicktime movie with pre-defined settings for all jobs of a certain type (Nuke in this example) that might hit your queue at any time? Does your studio have a dailies system?
In this example, the already shipping with Deadline, QuickTime plugin is used to generate a QuickTime whenever a Nuke comp completes in the queue. For some time, The Foundry, like may other software developers, “Hi Autodesk!” have been stuck without a x64bit Apple QuickTime library to hook their application up to generate QuickTimes. This is a major inconvenience and one I will be taking up personally with Mr S Jobs of California. Now whilst I’m writing a really strongly worded memo, there is also the secondary issue that Nuke licenses are really expensive and tying up one of these licenses ‘just’ to pump out a QuickTime is somewhat Overkill! So, here is Thinkbox Software’s example QuickTime Event Plugin: “QuickTimeGen” (with a few enhancements) which will create a QuickTime for any Nuke comp that completes in the queue.
QuicktimeGen.zip (3.33 KB)
Extract the zip file to “\yourDeadlineRepositoryPath\events”
Edit line: #25 for a different job plugin type if you say, want to process 3dsMax render jobs instead of Nuke. Please note that a QT settings file must be created prior to using this event plugin by manually creating one via the QuickTime submission interface in Deadline. Also, under super-user, “configure event plugins”, you will need to store the *.xml file on a network drive where your Deadline slaves can see it.
Now, of course, this is helpful, but we all use these EXR thingy’s now and QuickTime can’t read these files which is bad news. Again, I’ll be talking to Mr. Jobs about this as well 
So, how about another event plugin utilising the new DJV job plugin type introduced in Deadline v5.0 which just so happens to fully support EXR’s and if you’re really old skool, those things called RLA or RPF files from Autodesk. So, see below for an example event plugin for DJV which looks for any completed “3dsMax” job types which are ALSO in a Deadline pool called “animations”. Now, if you’ve got this far in my rambling post then you’re want to know that this bit of code resides on line: #32, so its up to you to customise this to your own pipeline, as you may want it to work on “Maya” jobs which might be in your own studio’s pool called “vfx_dailies” for example.
DJVQuicktimeGen.zip (6.23 KB)
Extract the zip file to “\yourDeadlineRepositoryPath\events”
So, in effect, this new event plugin structure gives Deadline users the ability to create lots of dependency based actions, for activities such as “dailies” creation on multiple plugin job types. Indeed, studios now have the ability to develop event plugins which are Deadline user specific or by adding some custom data (check out “Extra Info” key/value pairs) to a job upon submission, you could drive different or multiple event plugins, when a job completes, is suspended, fails, oh and the list continues…
Enjoy,
Mike
Anyone solution for this ?