Craig Allison wrote:
> Ok, so I've finally got around to looking into this and have decided to
> change my original way of thinking and give the artists the opportunity
> to render a quicktime on the farm once they are happy with the results
> previewed in Framecycler.
>
> I have taken the submit-shake-quicktime script and amended it to allow
> users to select which film they are working on, select the first frame
> in the sequence to render and dialogue for slate notes etc - the
> combination of all this information chooses the correct shake setup
> script on the network, replaces the variables, saves a copy and submits
> it to the farm.
>
> The script renders a 2K slate & greyscale (named and numbered correctly)
> and also a QT with the appropriate settings for the production. I have
> it working fine but now want to speed it up by splitting the job into
> two, i.e. one script to render the two 2k frames and one script to
> render the QT.
Sounds cool
But does it really take that long to generate the 2K slate and
greyscale to make it worth while to have those happen in separate
executions?
I would assume that the quicktime gen can't happen until the
2K slate/grayscale are done anyway, so even if another box
were working on the slate, the qt part would still have to
wait for it to get done.
But if there's something like 50 frames of slate, then I guess
it pays to have each frame render on a separate machine,
and then have the qt gen run as a 'jobdonecommand', so that
it doesn't run until all the slate frames are finished.
Thing is, if what you're doing is generating just one slate
image and one grayscale, but need those to hold for eg. 25x each,
then just have the render create one image each, then make symbolic
links for all the others; that'll save on disk space and render time,
so that the qt gen can refer to the links.
For instance, the script could render these two images:
slate-myshow-myshot.dpx
grayscale-myshow-myshot.dbx
and then create symlinks for the frame range, eg:
# GRAYSCALE
ln grayscale-myshow-myshot.dpx myshow-shot-frame-0001.dpx
ln grayscale-myshow-myshot.dpx myshow-shot-frame-0002.dpx
ln grayscale-myshow-myshot.dpx myshow-shot-frame-0003.dpx
:
ln grayscale-myshow-myshot.dpx myshow-shot-frame-0025.dpx
# SLATE
ln slate-myshow-myshot.dpx myshow-shot-frame-0026.dpx
ln slate-myshow-myshot.dpx myshow-shot-frame-0027.dpx
ln slate-myshow-myshot.dpx myshow-shot-frame-0028.dpx
:
ln slate-myshow-myshot.dpx myshow-shot-frame-0050.dpx
That way you can 'instantly' make all the frames from just
the single 2k image, so that the quicktime can insert them
into the shot as needed.
HTH.
--
Greg Ercolano, erco@(email surpressed)
Seriss Corporation
Rush Render Queue, http://seriss.com/rush/
Tel: (Tel# suppressed)
Fax: (Tel# suppressed)
Cel: (Tel# suppressed)
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