Fractional Frames

Deadline
1

Hi again,

I can see the option to render half-frames (Maya), but I was curious if there was support for rendering other fractional framerates? If my Render Globals are indicating that I would like to render every .01 frame for an animation that consisted of two frames, would that be possible to submit through Deadline?

Thanks in advance!

2

The half frame feature support for Maya is basically a hack to handle that particular case. Deadline itself can only work with full frames, but you can kind of get around this by changing the frame rate in the scene. However, we have seen that not all frames get rendered in this case.

For example, let’s say Deadline was to render frames 1 to 5 as part of a single task, and the frame rate was setup to render half frames. Frames 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, … up to frame 5 would get rendered. However, frame 5.5 would not (since the range is only to 5). When the next task starts at 6, frame 5.5 is still getting missed.

Would an option be to render non-fractional frames, and then set the frame rate as necessary in the video files?

3

Thanks again for the super fast and thorough reply!

I’ll certainly consider altering the scene timing, but it would be a nice feature to add for future releases. Deadline is so feature rich as it is, it would be a nice addition to sprinkle on top. I also could just set this render to go as a separate process through a command line render, the only thing I’d miss was having it in the Monitor. :slight_smile:

4

It can be something we consider for a future release, but it’s definitely not on the near-term roadmap (mainly because there really hasn’t been a demand for this to be supported).

You could probably make use of the CommandScript plugin:
thinkboxsoftware.com/deadlin … andscript/

Each command line is represented by a task, so you could set up multiple commands to each run a different chunk of frames and then submit it to Deadline as a CommandScript job. You could probably write a fancy submission script to automatically handle the creation of the command file based on certain input parameters.

Cheers,

  • Ryan
5

Thanks again, Ryan. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.