Deadline submitter for dailies

Deadline
1

Hi all

I’m looking to utilise the api of deadline for so some specific behaviour on job submission and was keen to see if anyone could offer some advice.

I want to try and achieve either of the following if possible:

  1. When I submit a job, I want to only render a specific number of frames, and suspend the rest of the tasks for later. Say for example first/middle/last frame. After those frames are approved, I would go back in and unsuspend the remainder. We currently have a system that does this but it requires two jobs on the farm - one for the dailies and one for the suspended “other” frames, but the idea is to have it all happen in the one job. Is it possible to achieve task-level control like this in the api?

  2. Alternatively, if I only submit the daily frames in a short sequence (say again first/middle/last frames) and once they are approved, is it possible to have a simple function that extends the frame range to a known range (we can query this) and at the same time change the comment section of the job from “dailies” to “full render” so it can be easily filtered? I’m thinking of a right-click dropdown within monitor.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

Craig

2

Good question. I came looking for the same answer. Did you ever find an acceptable solution?

3

I would go with the second option. It seems easier to implement.
These are called Job scripts - they live in custom/scripts/Jobs and appear in the job’s context menu.

The first option might be nicer in some sense - the range is known at submit time, so this is explicitly passed to the job. You see upfront how much work it would be, you could selectively unsuspend tasks, etc. This option could be implemented as an Event plugin in custom/events/ which would react in OnJobStarted and decide to suspend some tasks, based on some property of the job. Dunno if suspending the tasks this way could have unforeseen consequences.