From: Craig Allison <craig@(email surpressed)>
Subject: Re: Auto Rendering of QT's on jobcomplete
   Date: Thu, 28 May 2009 04:53:53 -0400
Msg# 1844
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Hey Greg

The way my Shake script works is that it renders the QT without the need for the slate and grey to be generated as 2k, it files them in from a set location and adds the relevant text and overlays a mask with counter and shot details, plus it files in the same "empty" slate, adds the same text and has another fileout to render the single 2k frame.  The greyscale that is added to the QT has a branched fileout to also render a single 2k grey at the end.

The problem I have observed is that the 2k slate renders itself over and over again until the script reaches the end of it's frame count, i.e. for a 200 frame QT, the slate will render 200 times, hence the need for splitting up the job so that I can give the slate and grey globals of 1 and the QT 1-200 for example.

I'm going to look into using an offset for the slate/grey to see if this addresses this issue, otherwise I'll look at Victor's suggestion.

Cheers

Craig



Craig Allison

Digital Systems & Data Manager

The Senate Visual Effects

Twickenham Film Studios

St.Margarets

Twickenham

TW1 2AW


t: 0208 607 8866 

skype: craig_9000

www.senatevfx.com

On 27 May 2009, at 22:21, Greg Ercolano wrote:

[posted to rush.general]

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.

-- 
Seriss Corporation
Rush Render Queue, http://seriss.com/rush/
Tel: 626-795-5922x23
Fax: 626-795-5947
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