Sorry if this is an obvious fix but I’m completely newb to Deadline and eager to get it up and running. All clients and slaves are running the same version of DL, Mono, and XQuartz. All slaves are pooled and grouped. I can submit via script in AE to the queue as expected and I can see the job sitting in queue on the monitors but the job won’t start until I launch the slave UI on the client. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Hey Chris,
It sounds like the render Slaves may be having some permissions problems. This affects LOTS of Mac users and Linux users alike. Deadline’s Repository requires full read/write permissions to all files hosted in the Repository share. The problem with that is by default on OS X/Linux, the files created on a remote share aren’t readable/writeable to everyone. Users only have full access to the files they create, and that’s likely the problem you’re seeing now.
The easiest solution is to mount the Repository on each machine with the same user account if the protocol you’re using supports that. It’s not secure, but it’s easy. If you have experience with ACLs, then you can set that up so everyone who is part of a particular group would have the right access permissions. OS X also supports the ability to ignore permissions on an entire volume, but that’s even less secure and I wouldn’t recommend doing that unless you dedicate that entire volume to Deadline.
What protocol are you using right now? I’m assuming AFP (which I have the least experience with). Knowing that, I might be able to figure out a few other ways to get the permissions to play right.
The slaves connect via AFP to a shared volume on the SAN which houses the repository. Each slave has it’s own OD account to authenticate with and each of those accounts are members of the group “Render Farm” in OD. I verified that this group has read/write access but problem still persists.
Security is not so much of an issue so if I need to host the repository on one of the slaves or connect to the repository share with the same account, I really have no problem with that.
Now I’m getting this error from my first render slave:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> 2012-07-25T16:00:21.714754-04:00 Render-1 0 < at line 776 at Deadline.Plugins.ScriptPlugin.RenderTasks (System.String taskId, Int32 startFrame, Int32 endFrame, System.String& outMessage) [0x00000] in :0 ]]> <_SlaveVersionString>v5.2.0.47700 R deadline test.aep - Comp 1_Black Solid 1 (multi-machine rendering frames 0-497) design3 Design-3 2012-07-25T00:33:50 AfterEffects 0-497 6 RenderPluginException <![CDATA[ at Deadline.Plugins.Plugin.RenderTask (System.String taskId, Int32 startFrame, Int32 endFrame) [0x00000] in :0 at Deadline.Slaves.SlaveRenderThread.RenderCurrentTask (Deadline.IO.TaskLogWriter tlw) [0x00000] in :0 ]]> 0 -2147483648 0 -2147483648 21 4200 21Slave 2 is still stuck in idle.
That’s a strange one. For whatever reason, it looks like aerender is looking for a library here:
//localhost/Applications/Adobe After Effects CS5.5/Adobe After Effects CS3.app/Contents/aerendercore.app/Contents/MacOS/aerendercore
It seems to be confused, because it’s looking for the file in the CS3.app package in the CS5.5 folder. It looks like the AE installation might be corrupt or something.
Just to confirm it’s not a Deadline specific issue, what happens when you open a terminal on the machine and run this command?
"/Applications/Adobe After Effects CS5.5/aerender" -project "/Users/skylineadmin/Deadline/slave/Render-1/jobsData/deadline test.aep" -comp "Comp 1" -output "/Users/design3/Desktop/Comp 1_Black Solid 1.mov" -mpCheers,
- Ryan
I get the following: PROGRESS: Launching After Effects...
aerender ERROR 1: unable to find after effects application at file://localhost/Applications/Adobe%20After%20Effects%20CS5.5/Adobe%20After%20Effects%20CS3.app/Contents/aerendercore.app/Contents/MacOS/aerendercore at line 776
Since these are G5s, they are only running CS3. Is there a conflict there?
Did you just rename the CS3 folder on these machines to try and render CS5.5 jobs on them? I’ve read that this error can be caused by renaming the AE folder. Even if AE wasn’t throwing this error, I doubt that you could render CS5.5 projects in CS3 because they wouldn’t be backward compatible.
Cheers,
- Ryan
Actually, I copied the CS5.5 app folder over to the render slaves. Maybe I’ll try to force install CS5.5 with Pacifist in case it’s looking for something that didn’t get copied over.
Not sure you’ll have much luck with that. CS5 and later are Intel-only:
forums.adobe.com/thread/619514
Cheers,
- Ryan
So is DL dependent upon the actual app and not the CLI executable?
The AE command line renderer is dependent on the app libraries. This is the case if you are using Deadline or not. Essentially, if the application won’t render independently of Deadline, it won’t render with Deadline. 
Cheers,
- Ryan