Using AE Non-English versions with Deadline

Deadline
1

We’re testing Deadline here in Japan (currently in Free mode, and then we’ll request an eval license for a bigger test). AfterEffects jobs all seem to fail.



It looks like this is due to using the Japanese version of AfterEffects (which is, in fact, all we can buy here in Japan!). In the error log I see lines such as the following:



0: WARNING: Detected popup dialog “モーションスケッチ”.

or

0: WARNING: Detected popup dialog “スムーザー”.



What makes this extra-bad is that the job does not fail and get returned to the user; instead, it remains queued and keeps accumulating errors (I don’t know for how long, I eventually stopped it), probably because the Deadline AE plugin itself is throwing exceptions like the below. I gather that if I set “Error Limit Before a Job Fails” in Repository Options I could get it to give up on the job.



Scheduler Thread - Render Thread 0 threw an error:

Scheduler Thread - Exception during render: Dialog popup detected: Title “スムーザー”, Message “適用”



I attached the complete error log file if it’s helpful. I’m on Windows XP SP2. Using Japanese versions of apps is typically no problem, and to verify that I picked out the final AERender.exe command line from the Deadline log and ran it in the DOS shell – it ran to completion without any errors.



I’ll attach my first attempted fix as a comment, it didn’t work too well…

2

I know it’s hacky, but I figured I should try changing the C:\DeadlineRepository\plugins\AfterEffects\AfterEffects.dlinit file to see if I could change it to the Japanese versions of these popup messages. Unfortunately, either that file isn’t unicode-aware, or I couldn’t figure out the right tool to save it in. I changed the file, restarted the Deadline Slave, and when I tried to requeue the AE job I got the following error.



Error Message

Exception during render: Bad regex, “モーションスケッチ”: Unmatched [ or [^



Scheduler Thread - Render Thread 0 threw an error:

Scheduler Thread - Exception during render: Bad regex, “???”: Unmatched [ or [^



I can forward the complete error log for this if it’s useful!

3

Hi Leo,



You could try disabling popup handling, which should fix the problem

you’re running into. We added popup handling to the after effects plugin

because of a rare case where after effects would display a dialog during

rendering that would halt everything until someone manually pressed OK

on the dialog. We’re not even sure if this problem exists after after

effects 6.5 (when the aerender.exe command line renderer stopped

displaying the AE user interface during rendering).



One thing we noticed when we added popup handling is that Deadline

considered all the toolboxes in after effects as popups, which is likely

the root of your problem. So anyway, to make a long story short, first

undo all the changes you made to AfterEffects.dlinit and then change

this line:



UsePopupHandling=1



To this:



UsePopupHandling=0



Then save the file and try rendering again. Note that you may have to

restart your Slave applications to ensure they have the updated

information. This will ensure Deadline renders like you would from the

command line, so I would expect this to solve your problem. Let us know

if you have any luck!



Cheers,

4

Awesome Ryan, thanks.



Turning off popup handling gets around it fine (hopefully we won’t run into the popup problem!). On to the next set of tests!