Render PNG seq+AIFF and then bundle into QT

Deadline
1

I have a workflow question.

At the moment our AE artists send jobs to the farm simply as quicktime renders. This is mostly fine, but I would like to move toward frame rendering. Right now frame rendering isn’t super easy for us, because we have to give a Quicktime ProRes 4x4 render to the edit team.

I know it is possible to create QT files in Deadline. My question is, how could I set it up so that an artist sends a job to the queue as a Png Sequence + AIFF, and some script kicks in and assembles those into a quicktime when it is complete? Would I add this into the AE plugin (jsx), a python script, or is there a built-in way to do this? Preferably the frames and AIFF would be rendered to a “work” folder, and the QT would be moved to a “complete” folder.

I am debating a few different render managers. If I can get this workflow working in a robust way I’m sold. I am OK with writing a simple Python script for this if that is what is required.

2

This might be a good job for our Draft tool:
thinkboxsoftware.com/news/20 … dline.html

I’ll be asking our Draft developers if this specific workflow can be handled by Draft. I’ll get back to you as soon as I hear back.

Cheers,

  • Ryan
3

Unfortunately, Draft doesn’t currently support Prores 4x4, it can only do Prores 422 right now. We can definitely look into how we could support it, though.

In the meantime, if you’re willing to get down and dirty and do a bit more legwork, you could always use the Draft Event Plugin for the automation, and supplement your Draft script with an additional command-line tool like ffmbc (or ffmpeg itself) to do all the stuff we haven’t hooked into yet.

Hope this helps,

  • Jon
4

Great, yeah I’ve used FFMBC before to encode ProRes. In case you’re wondering, I had to do a workaround for it to output correct colors (like QT does) - add this to the command line -vf colormatrix=bt601:bt709 . I would prefer to use QT if I could, though.

Also I noticed your QT plugin uses Quicktime7, which allows for ProRes 4x4.

5

We are writing an event plug-in python script to cover this problem as well. Currently the solution involves a copy of Digital Fusion because of it’s ascii based file system and “wait for file” render option. It has some bugs but so far we have managed to consistently produce a rendered quicktime moments after the image sequence finishes it’s render. From the quick tests I’ve manage to sneak it it’s much faster than a farm machine rendering out the quicktime.

good luck!