Deadline for After Effects

Render Farm Preparation

Before you go about submitting your project to the render farm, consider these points:

• The Render Farm is ideal for image sequences. Due to how the render farm functions, it is most efficient when it is rendering image sequences. Individual frames can be sent out to multiple computers at once, but a video file can only be rendered on one computer. If you have a video to render, then it is recommended to do a local render.

• Remove spaces and special characters (<>:"/\|?*) from folders and file name. (<>:"/\|?*) and other special characters can interfere with how a file name is "read" by the computer, so it is best to avoid them entirely. Limit file names to alphanumeric characters (abc, 123, etc).
  

• Save revisions of your scene.
  

• Keep file names under 256 characters.

• Do not render in jpeg's. Jpeg uses lossy compression, meaning it does not retain all the data in your image. It also degrades every time you save it. Use png's or exr's (or any other format that is lossless).

• All comps must be uniquely named. If you have compositions that have the same name, then there is a possibility of errors when rendering.

Submitting a Job

Step One - Login to your personal account or PCoIP

• Click on "Other User" and login to your personal account, using your myEC credentials (first initial lastname, myEC password).
• You can submit to the Render Farm over PCoIP. See How to access the Remote PC's (PCoIP) for instructions.

Step Two - Prepare Project for the render farm

• Open your After Effects project.
  
• It is important to include only the material that is necessary for you render. We can easily remove unused footage and compositions by using the "Reduce Project" and "Remove Unused Footage" tools in the "File>Dependencies" menu.
• If you have one composition that houses all your comps and footage, you can select this composition in the project panel and use "File>Dependencies>Reduce Project". This will remove everything not in this composition. You can undo this step, but you should save a new version in case you delete something that you need.
• If you have a couple compositions that are independent from each other, you can use "File>Dependencies>Remove Unused Footage". This will remove any footage that is not used in any compositions. Once done, you should save a new version in case you delete something that you need.
• Next we want to gather all the files that we need into one spot. This is useful if you load in files from across your computer. 
• Go to "File>Dependencies>Collect Files..." and select "Collect..."
  
• Navigate to the Render drive (or a hard drive, or OneDrive) and choose a descriptive name for the soon to be created project folder.
  
• Wait for the collection process to finish. Depending on how many assets your project has, this could take a while. Once it is finished, After Effects will automatically open your newly collected project.

Render Drive location in Windows Explorer

Step Three- Open Project From Render Drive

• Once your files have successfully copied to R:\, open your comp from this location.
• Add the comp(s) that you want to render to the Render Queue.
  
• Go to the Render Queue and select Output Module. Select an image file type (.PNG, .TIFF, .JPEG, etc...) and make sure that the "Use Comp Frame Number" checkbox is selected. Hit OK.
  

You must render an image sequence to make full use of the render farm; a video file will only be sent to one render node.


• Select "Output To:" and navigate to your folder on the Render Drive. Name your file something descriptive (no spaces) and keep the "[#####]" in the file name (that is where the frame numbering goes). Below the file name, you can name the subfolder your sequence will be rendered into; make sure you don't use spaces! Your output location MUST be on the Render Drive, or your render will not work.

Step Three - Submitting your job to Deadline

• Go to File>Scripts>DeadlineAfterEffectsClient.jsx. It will take a few seconds to load. Note: if the script is not there, you can also submit from Deadline Monitor. Open Deadline Monitor from the Start menu, go to the "Submit>2D/Compositing>After Effects" menu and fill in the submission window.
• Name your job something descriptive. Use v01, v02, etc... if you need to rerender.
• Change the group to "after_effects."
• Select "Use Frame List From The Comp."
• Change "Frames Per Task" to 10. If you know your frames will take a long time (+10 minutes per frame), set this between 1 and 3.
• Hit Submit at the bottom. A pop up will appear, warning you that the path for the output file does not exist. Do not worry, it will be created, it was the subfolder defined earlier. Click yes and your job will be submitted.

Step Four - Manage your job

Once the job has been submitted, you can open the Deadline application "Monitor" to keep track of your job and about other activity on the farm. To open Monitor, you can find it in the start menu under "Network Rendering", it has a green computer monitor as an icon.

Deadline Monitor

• From here you can keep track of your render. The left panel is a list of all the jobs currently rendering and completed. If you click on your job, the panel on the right will let you know information about each frame.
• Within 30 seconds your job should change from ‘queued’ to ‘rendering’, unless there is a long queue on the farm.
• Your job may gather (many) errors, but most errors are a computer that tried to pick up your job but was unable to render because it was missing a plugin or was interrupted by someone needing to use that computer.
• If your job does not begin after a few minutes or gathers many errors without making progress, double check your image paths and render output and make sure they all are on the R:\ drive.
• Notice a particular computer is consistently messing up your render? You can right-click on a frame rendered by the culprit and select "Requeue Tasks by *computer name*". A dialogue box with a checkbox will come up and ask if you want to blacklist the computer. Click the checkbox and hit "OK" and all tasks previously rendered by that computer will be redone, and that computer will be prevented from rendering your job again. If this happens, please email us at animtech@ecuad.ca so we can take a look at that computer.
• Do not delete jobs, we can use the error reports to troubleshoot what may be wrong with your render.

Step Seven - Retrieve your files

• Once your job is completed, you can retrieve your files from the project folder on the Render Drive.
  • If you are on PCoIP, you can transfer your image sequence over OneDrive, or simply use the PCoIP computer to create a video that you can more easily transfer to OneDrive or upload to moodle, Youtube, Vimeo, etc. . Make sure to back up your work.
• Please delete your rendered images and project folder once you are absolutely sure you don't need them anymore and have them backed up in other locations. We need to keep the Render Farm clean and tidy in order to ensure it runs smoothly. All files will be deleted from the Render Drive in May.

Failed Jobs

If your render is slow or producing undesirable results, you can halt your process in one of a couple ways:

Right click:

• Suspend - This will pause the current job, but allow frames that are currently rendering to finish.

• Fail Job - This will pause the current job, stopping all rendering frames.

Please only manage/modify your own jobs.
Do not delete jobs, we can use the error reports to troubleshoot what may be wrong with your render.

Main Reasons Render Jobs Fail

The 5 most common network rendering errors in order of frequency

1. Files and folders are not properly placed in the R:\ Render Drive. This is by far the most common error. Please check your textures to make sure they are in the right location. This is managed much more easily if you have a properly set up project folder.
   
2. Incorrect project paths, even if your files are in the correct place (e.g. the texture paths in your scene have C:\ instead of R:\).
3. Missing project files, especially textures.
4. Missing plugins/scripts: Emily Carr must own all the plugins you are using , or be able to download them for free! Cracked plugins will not work!
5.  Inefficiently or bizarrely constructed scene files. Too many lights or needlessly complicated scene geometry are common mistakes.
   

If the job keeps failing after you’ve ruled out all these things, please email animtech@ecuad.ca