Trapcode Form render glitch

Deadline
1

Hey guys,

We are working on a project right now for wich we created a scene in After Effects with Trapcode Form. It is basically an Intro which shows multiple pictures in a picture cloud picked randomly from a comp using the “textured polygon” option within Form. We send that project to our farm and were suprised when we look at the results.

It seems that Form combined with multiple machine rendering has a problem when using the “Random - Still Frame” function since every 1st frame of the Frame task is not correct. Of course I could increase the frame task to something like 50 or 100 and get less “glitch” frames but since our project is quite big we need all the power we can get form our farm.

I’m not sure if this is the right place to adress this issue and I may post this into the Red Giant Forum as well but I wanted to ask if anyone of you noticed this already and might have at least a workaround or better a fix. I’ve attached a demo movie in case my description doesn’t make sense… :question: Frames per taks was set to 4 and as you can see every 4th frame is wrong.

I’ve tried a few things in Form and Deadline already but the glitch still remains. Any advise is welcome.

After Effects version 2015.3
Deadline version 9.0.3.0
Trapcode From version 2.2.0

Thanks in advance.
Trapcode-Form_frame_glitch.mp4 (2.93 MB)

2

We see this sort of thing with simluations all the time. Because the start of each task requires the output from the last (in this case the random number), usually you have to either bake out that dependency first or do everything as a single task.

We don’t have a way to feed any starter values into each task (I don’t think we could) but is there a way to deterministically assign videos so that you can then do something like name the input videos in a random way? I’m assuming the clips are also different lengths which might look particularly weird if the same set of videos play in different regions.

I think Red Giant will have to write their own pseudo random number generator and make sure they step it through all frames starting from the first to make this look correct.