Font Synchronization problem with After Effects

[anon1901147]

Running Deadline 6.2.1.50 Set up font synchronization for After Effects CC 2014 from shared network volume (XSan Samba reshare) to Windows 7 nodes at C:\Temp as recommended.

On submission from OSX clients, I can see all fonts are copied to Windows nodes, but job stalls as render will not start and last log message is “Synchronizing local Font folder”. At this point, cannot cancel tasks and have to restart/kill slaves to free up the render nodes. Renders will work if synch is disabled.

Initial suspicion was dot files from XSan volume (it might be nice if synchronization didn’t copy these down) but after dot_clean on font folder and deleting .DS_Store file, but still had the same result. All fonts are TTF and OTF and same happens, even with only one font file. However, render will proceed as normal if font folder is empty.

[eamsler]

I was trying to help a client with this a few weeks ago where five of their Windows machines would sync fine and another five would lock the same way you’re seeing.

We played around with various permissions and other bits, both locally and on the server and we weren’t able to reproduce here. After digging around a bit today, it does look like it’s a known problem:
“SendMessage may hang…”
pinvoke.net/default.aspx/gdi … ntresource

I’m adding an internal ticket to fix this. For the time being, you’ll be safer installing those fonts yourself for now.

Thanks for reporting this!