AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

Submit and render only missing frames

by default when you submit something to render (from Maya /Arnold in our case) Deadline will render the whole defined framerange, no matter if already some frames exist or not

it would be useful in some cases to be able to tell Deadline to skip the existing frames - is this functionality available ?
We previously used Royalrender wich offers a plain submission flag that tells to check or not for existing frames.

There are some applications where this is supported, but only when the application itself has the option, like AE. Due to the way Deadline does multi frame tasks, meaning that the task must be a single frame or a contiguous series of frames, it’s hard for Deadline to support skipping a frame outside an application’s context. Hopefully at some point we can support a change to this, but for the time being this is the state of things.

alright thank you! Good to know - I think we can workaround this. Maybe we can write ourselves a plugin for that.

Just some comments on existing workflows and what we could probably do about it:

For existing jobs today, what I usually do after the job is complete is to change the frames-per-task to 1 (which is usually already the case for batch-mode jobs), then use the ‘scan for missing output’ option in the job’s right click menu (it’s hidden in the ‘output’ submenu).

For Maya, if you’re using Batch mode, because we’re controlling it directly using Melscript we could code an option to skip frames if we see that frame already has output files. This used to be a larger problem because we didn’t track every output path and we might have missed something. With the advent of Draft we needed to get a lot smarter about where the output was placed and the integration team’s done a great job on that.

If you do feel like creating a custom plugin for this, let me know and I can help out.

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