Force Nuke to Render on One Machine?

Deadline
1

Hey Thinkbox!
Quick question for ya - I have a script that makes 3 deadline jobs. One is a maya render and the other two are nuke jobs. The two nuke jobs are dependent on the Maya Render, and read from the same nuke script, but I set the “Write Nodes” value in the plugin info file to split them as separate jobs. The reason I do that is that one of the jobs does an image burn in / slate creation, and the other nuke job (write node) creates a QT file. The image burn job is set to IsFrameDependent, so that as the maya renders complete, the nuke script burns in the slate and other information - but obviously, for quicktime movie creation, it has to wait for all the frames to complete, and run as a single process. So for example, for a one hundred frame render, Two of the jobs are set to a frame range of 100, but the third job (Quick time creation) is set to run as a single frame - but obviously that causes nuke to only process one frame. What is the syntax for the job info or plug in info files to ask deadline to render all 100 frames, but as a single task? I have seen other methods on your site for creating Quicktime movies, but I would really prefer to use nuke to generate the movie as we are doing a bunch of image processing to the input files before creating the movie. I am about to try setting the chunk size on the quicktime job to 100, but I figured I’d ping you in case there is a better way?

Thanks for any help!

Seth

2

Hi Seth,
You’re right, setting the ChunkSize is the correct variable to force all the tasks to process as effectively one task. If your not sure of the ‘incoming’ frame length, then you can set the ChunkSize to a high number such as 10000 to ensure it supports a really long frame count. To ensure it only run’s on 1 machine, setting the MachineLimit=1 will achieve this. See bottom of event plugin scripting web page for a QT generation example:

thinkboxsoftware.com/deadlin … eventssdk/

writer.WriteLine( "MachineLimit=1" ) writer.WriteLine( "ChunkSize=100000" )

Just a thought, have you considered using Draft instead of Nuke as it was designed for (a) slate/burn-ins, (b) pump out movies like MOV’s and © would save you tying up your expensive Nuke render node licenses! There are other benefits such as py recipes on the Thinkbox website, ready to be customised to your studio needs, no need to install/deploy Nuke, as Draft sort’s itself out from the Deadline repository and auto-updates itself when used on a slave. If Draft doesn’t do something as part of your “input image processing” that you mentioned, it would be great if you could provide these as feature requests to the Draft developers!