Q: Frame ranges vs tasks

Deadline
1

Hi
I just stumbled across this: I need to submit an Irradiance cache job that renders from 0-375, every 25 frames, as one task, on one specific cpu.
So in the Cinema submitter i go: 0-375x25 and Frames Per Task to 376. But this submits 16 tasks, one for each frame.
What’s the trick to submit this as one task?

-b

2

Unfortunately the way that tasks are handled in Deadline, the only two frame formats for a task that are valid are a single frame, or a range. Therefor ‘1, 26, 51, 76, 101’ is not a valid frame list. I think there is a plan on the roadmap to refactor how we handle frames in a task, but for the time being this is not an option.

3

Ok. Thanks.
I’ll try to set the frame rate in the file it self and submit 0-15 from that.

-b

4

So, for fun I dug into this a little bit. It looks like it might be possible if we implement frame stepping into the submitter.

There’s a command line flag for the frame list that looks like this:

-frame from [to [step]]

In that case, it would be a matter of entering something like this:

Frames: 0-375
FPT: 10000
Frame Skip: 25 (option doesn’t exist yet)

I’ll make an issue for this, it should be really easy to add.

5

Great! Didn’t know that one.

-b

6

Would it be ok if we instead set it up like this:

  • Allow you to do a frame range with a step. For example 1-100x10 (every 10th).
  • Then have a checkbox that is “Submit entire sequence as single task”, rather than entering a specific frames per task.

The single tasks would then instruct C4D to render that range and step all as a single task.

That seems to solve the problem you are looking for, and it seems more intuitive than exposing a separate “step”, and making the user specific a frames-per-task.