Deadline tasks

Deadline
1

I’m writing a Deadline plugin and submission interface for a file conversion utility. The original command line converter operates on one file at a time. The submission script will allow the user to select a higher-level folder to recursively process its contents on the farm. The files could have arbitrary names (i.e. they do not necessarily have a numbered suffix like rendered frames).

At first I thought my Deadline plugin would simply have an input/output file path plus any conversion arguments, but that wouldn’t work for a file set because Deadline tasks are based on frame numbers. I don’t see a way to avoid sending the entire list of files (constructed by the submission script) to the Deadline plugin and then use the task’s frame index to look up the actual file name from the list (which as I said earlier, might not actually have a frame number embedded in the filename).

Is this the recommended way to go about things? When I looked at the API, I couldn’t find a way to create a job and then manually add tasks with custom properties at submission time.

2

Hello,

I think what you are looking to do can be done using the Command Script plugin, which has documentation here thinkboxsoftware.com/deadlin … andscript/ and gives examples of what you would put into the command file to make sure it runs all of the individual file conversions as a different task. It’s a pretty good tool for running a set of commands, like your file conversion, without needing them to be all the same sequence.

3

Interesting. I could see making a custom submission interface for the converter that simply calls the Command Script plugin. It sort of pushes the assembly of the command line arguments to the submission script rather than using the RenderArgument() callback in a custom plugin. And looking at the Command Script plugin source, I see that it uses the task frame number as an index for the line number in the list of the commands to execute.

4

Those conclusions sound about right, yes.