Hi all,

First time poster here.

I'm just giving the Deadline 30 day trial a go and so far am very impressed. Our company mainly uses After Effects and FormZ, but occasionally Lightwave.

All my After Effects users design on Macs and I currently have 6 G5's in a custom built farm (although I recently bumped this up to 18 G5's for a specific job). I've been searching around for something a little stabler than the incredibly crappy adobe render engine (that little TV icon is really starting to get on my nerves...)

I wondered if there are any plans in the future to include OS X support for Deadline?

Another quick question. I've done a very quick server/slave (on a single machine) setup to test functionality and have got an After Effects render working ok, but each time the slave goes to render a frame it opens AE, render's the frame, closes AE and starts the process again. Is this normal? Or am I doing something stoopid... (more likely the latter).

Regards,

Chris.

Hi Chris,



We do plan on adding OS X support (as well as linux support) in the near

future. We don’t have an exact timeline on when this will be finished,

but we plan to begin development in the next month or two.



The process you’ve described is normal regarding After Effects jobs. The

aerender.exe executable has a -reuse flag which uses an existing running

instance of after effects, so perhaps we could explore the possibility

of keeping after effects open during the duration of the job, as opposed

to starting and stopping it for each task.



It is definitely possible that After Effects will take longer to start

up than to render the frame. In cases like this, we recommend setting

the chunksize (the “render in groups of” option) to something like 5,

10, 20, etc. This way, each task consists of multiple frames, and After

Effects will only be started and shutdown once for each task.



Kind regards,

• Ryan
  

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for the quick response.

I'll keep an eye out for any OS X developments.

Cheers,

Chris.

This is just an update on reusing an already running instance of after effects while rendering, as opposed to opening and closing the application for each task.



While some time is saved because after effects isn’t opened everytime, the scene still has to be reloaded every task. So unfortunately the scene won’t remain loaded in memory.



On our farm, after effects only takes a few seconds to load, so it hardly affects the render time. In cases where render time is only a second or two per frame, we continue to use chunkizes of 5 or greater to reduce render time.



Due strictly to the fact that the scene doesn’t remain loaded in memory, making use of the -reuse flag does not appear worthwhile.



Regards,

• Ryan