I’m playing around with submitting jobs associated with Shotgun tasks. I’d like to have Deadline submit a thumbnail with the new version. I’m assuming that I have to use Draft for that, but I’m unsure how to do that. I tried just encoding an mov but it complains when I go to submit saying that I don’t have a file format selected and no path set in the Optional Path Box. This is what led me to make this post. Since we make extensive use of the Render Outputs and we aren’t using Layered EXRs at the moment, we don’t ever use the Optional Output Box. If we do put a path in there, it essentially ignores what our Render Outputs in the scene say. So I’m curious if this was an oversight or am I missing something in this workflow?
Naw, this is the appropriate section, since Deadline is doing the actual uploading to Shotgun, Draft has very little to do with it, to be honest.
Assuming you’re rendering an image sequence, and those images are of a format recognized by Shotgun (I think this is a fairly limited list), it should just be a matter of selecting which frame you want to use in the Shotgun Event Plugin Settings (either First, Middle or Last).
If you’re rendering something like .exr’s though, you’d have to turn on “Convert Thumbnails with Draft”, again in the Shotgun Event Plugin Settings. This should happen pretty seemlessly, as long as it’s a format Draft is compatible with.
All that said, if Deadline doesn’t know where the output is, it can’t really do any of the above. For that to be the case, you need to do one of two things:
A) Specify the optional output path (doesn’t sound like this is an option for you guys).
B) Submit the Deadline Job using the integrated Modo submitter – that way the submitter can grab the output paths from Modo, and pass them along with the Deadline job.
Note that pretty much the same caveats apply to uploading any .mov outputs from Draft or Quicktime to Shotgun.
Let me know if you have any other questions, or if it still doesn’t work for you!
So first I’ll start with the thumbnails:
I checked out the Event and turned on the thumbnail making portion. It doesn’t seem to be making a thumbnail for each version. I’m not sure if I’m missing anything, but I included some screen grabs.
For the Draft and the Optional Output box:
I am using the integrated Modo submitter. I have modified it quite extensively actually and I was thinking that maybe it would be possible to create a second output box that would be solely used fro Draft. It would be helpful to know if this is a valid work around for us and where in the scripts I would look to make those modifications. I know how to add items to the submitter dialog window, but I’m unsure where I would look to make draft look at my custom output path box rather than the default one.
Looking at the Shotgun.py it seems like Deadline needs to be aware if where the image files are being rendered to. The problem is that unless we use the Optional Output Box, Deadline has no awareness of where or what Modo is writing out. I’ve been planning on fixing this for a while by sending along a variable containing the info during job submission. I guess the big challenge is know how to send that info along to the other scripts.
We’re actually updating the modo submitter in Deadline 6.2 to include the output paths when submitting from within modo (so you don’t have to override the output path). The 6.2 beta should be starting soon, so keep an eye on our forum announcements or twitter feed.
Well, you just killed my afternoon haha! But that’s awesome. Any idea when beta might be starting? We’re just starting an eval of Shotgun and it would be great if we were able to get Deadline working smoothly with it in order to sell it to the higher ups.