I’m writing this on behalf of our compositor, who is taking a long walk after dealing with this issue for a few nights now… so i’m a little short on specifics this first time around.



We’re having a problem where After Effects 7 renders through deadline are turning off layers at random. We only have 5-6 AE PCs on the farm, they’re just workstations around the office, and though we initially had plug-in issues, those threw very clear errors and we were able to fix that up. This issue generates no errors.



We are using deadline version 2.0.18035.



Any help you could provide would be very appreciated.



Mark

I don't know if this applies to your situation but are you using any quicktime movies as source material.  You may be having network conflicts and that could cause the layers to drop out on random frames.  I've never seen this in AE but I've run into it with network rendering 3ds max when using quicktime movies as textures.

just a thought.

V Miller

This sounds like it’s either an AE specific problem, or a network problem, as Vance suggested. Deadline simply uses the aerender.exe command line tool for rendering, which doesn’t have any options regarding layers.



Is the issue completely random, or does it seem specific to certain machines. In the Tasks list in the Monitor, you can view which slaves rendered which frames. Compare the bad frames to the slaves that rendered them to see if you notice a pattern.



If that’s not the case, perhaps you can try rendering the job with only one or two slaves at a time (using the job’s Machine Limit option). This might help if you are having network problems.



Finally, try rendering locally on your workstations from the command prompt using the same command line options that Deadline is using. The slave prints out the command line arguments during rendering, so you can reference that. Just make sure to copy the AE project file locally and point to that file in the command line options.



Let us know your results.



Cheers,

• Ryan