I hope this request has not been made before, otherwise it would be redundant, but here it is. A coworker and I were discussing a way to create a schedule, which would help the various users figure out what jobs need to be rendered, which have priority and how to get one of your jobs into this schedule.
My initial suggestion was to create an Outlook or similar calendar, which people could then reference to see what which jobs are coming up and which have priority. This is particularly helpful when you have 10 to 40 different projects running on any given week. Some jobs drop in at the last minute, others, we have a few weeks to a month to plan out rendering. It was at this time that I was wishing for such as schedule to connect to Outlook/Other calendar system, or for that matter, it would be great if Deadline had a similar system integrated, where users could plan out all these jobs in such as way where all the other user know what has priority and what is coming up.
Actually, that’s the reasons Pools exist: to create sub-queues inside the main one. This wouldn’t give you exact dates and times, but it does let you plan out project priorities and split up the farm fairly without needing to resort to micro-management (though Deadline as a real-time strategy game would be kind of fun!).
One of the problems with trying to schedule work based on time is that Deadline does not make use of historical data to estimate how long a future job may take (it’s an interesting problem, and some studios have tackled it with custom methods that work exclusively for their pipelines).
I’m using OnJobSubmitted based event script to control how our teams are using pools (each team has equal share of the farm for priority use) and priorities, and what productions can use high priority pool that overrides team based pools.
Now granted we’re fairly small studio when it comes to global scale, so it might not work on bigger studios, but for us it has so far worked pretty well.