It would be great if deadline could handle frame range changes more gracefully. For example, lets say you are rendering frames 1001-1050, and 10 machines are assigned from frames 1001-1010. If i then modify the frame range to include 20 additional frames (1001-1070), it would be great if the 10 machines rendering would keep rendering, instead of being requeued.

I would add that changing the chunk size should retain already rendered frames.

I understand not all applications give accurate read-out of frames rendered (just exiting as exit code = 0) but for the applications that do (Nuke, Maya etc) it would be great to be able to change the chunk size without losing frames that have already been rendered within tasks.

If this functionaility would break or destabilize some software, perhaps only enable on the software that supports it or add a check box to the “change framerange” window to enable or disable “gracefull editing”

Actually, the API does support tacking new tasks on the end. The hard part is tracking the frames as they render as Ricardo pointed out, so the ones added to the end isn’t such a big deal.

The API call is RepositoryUtils.AppendJobFrameRange().

I’ll put a request in to have that added to the UI. It’s not perfect for those existing tasks, but it’ll be better to allow users to tack on a few extra. You can expand the chunk sizes for completed bits, but if the task is half-way done there’s not much luck there.

I’d add a big +1 to this request.

Added! Thanks guys. Specifically, having the Monitor allow tacking on frames.

Dynamically changing the tasks is a whole other challenge that we have tracking on.