Quicktime Generation Plug-in Guide
Job Submission - Apple Quicktime
Jobs can be submitted from the Monitor. You can use the Submit menu, or you can right-click on a job and select Scripts -> Submit Quicktime Job To Deadline to automatically populate some fields in the Quicktime submitter based on the job's output.
Note that in order to use this Quicktime plugin, you MUST have Quicktime version 7.04 or later installed on your slaves, as well as any workstations that Quicktime jobs will be submitted from.
Submission Options
The general Deadline options are explained in the Job Submission documentation, and the Shotgun options are explained in the Draft and Shotgun documentation. The Quicktime specific options are:
- Input Images: The frames you would like to generate the Quicktime from. If a sequence of frames exist in the same folder, Deadline will automatically collect the range of the frames and will set the Frame Range field accordingly.
- Output Movie File: The name of the Quicktime to be generated.
- Frames: The frame range used to generate the Quicktime.
- Codec: The codec format to use for the Quicktime.
- Frame Rate: The frame rate of the Quicktime.
- Audio File: Specify an audio file to be added to the Quicktime movie. Leave blank to disable this feature.
- Settings File: The Quicktime settings file to use. Press the Create Settings button to create a new Quicktime settings file.
Job Submission - Fusion Quicktime
Jobs can be submitted from the Monitor. You can use the Submit menu, or you can right-click on a job and select Scripts -> Submit Fusion Quicktime Job To Deadline to automatically populate some fields in the Fusion Quicktime submitter based on the job's output.
Note that in order to use this Quicktime plugin, you MUST have Fusion installed on your slaves.
Submission Options
The general Deadline options are explained in the Job Submission documentation, and the Shotgun options are explained in the Draft and Shotgun documentation. The Fusion Quicktime specific options are:
- Input Images: The frames you would like to generate the Quicktime from. If a sequence of frames exist in the same folder, Deadline will automatically collect the range of the frames and will set the Frame Range field accordingly.
- Output Movie File: The name of the Quicktime to be generated.
- Frames: The frame range used to generate the Quicktime.
- Renderer: Select the version of Fusion to generate the Quicktime with.
- Frame Rate: The frame rate of the Quicktime.
- BG Plate: Specify an optinal background plate. The Quicktime will render using the selected file as the background.
- Template: Specify an optional flow/comp template. See the Template documentation below for more information.
- Artist Name: if you have a text tool with "artist" in its name in the selected template flow/comp, its text will be set to the name that is specified.
- Curve Correction: Select to turn on the color curves tool (available when using templates only).
- Codec: The codec format to use for the Quicktime.
- On Missing Frames: What the generator will do when a frame is missing or is unable to load. There are 4 options:
- Fail: Nothing will be generated until the missing frame becomes available.
- Hold Previous: The last valid frame will be included instead of the missing frame.
- Output Black: A black frame will be included instead of the missing frame.
- Wait: The generator will wait until the missing frame becomes available.
- Quality %: The quality of the Quicktime.
- Proxy: The ratio of pixels to render (for example, if set to 4, one out of every four pixels will be rendered).
- Gamma: The gamma level of the Quicktime.
- Exposure Compensation: The "stops" value used to calculate the gain parameter of the Brightness/Contrast tool. The gain parameter is calculated by using the value pow(2,stops).
- Overide Start Frame: Allows the starting frame in the quicktime to be overridden. For example, if you are making a quicktime from images with a range 101-150, you can override the start frame to be 1, and the range in the quicktime will appear as 1-50.
- Load/Save Preset: Allows you to save your Fusion Quicktime options to a preset file, so that you can load them again later.
Quicktime Templates
A flow/comp template can be specified to put all the messages and watermarks that you want into the Quicktime. It has some standardized flow/comp naming conventions so that the plug-in can set some standard text tool values, as well as the input and output images. Here is an example of a very simple template file.
As you can see, this simple template consists of a loader, a saver, a text tool, and a merge tool. This template simply merges the text tool with the loader so that "This is a test" appears in your Quicktime. You can create your own template files, but they must meet the following requirements. As long as these requirements are met, you can add whatever you like between the loader and the saver.
- There must be exactly one loader and one saver.
- The loader must have a dummy file name specified (the file doesn't have to exist).
Plug-in Configuration
The Apple Quicktime plug-in requires no configuration. You can configure the Fusion Quicktime plug-in settings from the Deadline Monitor. While in super user mode, select Tools -> Configure Plugins and select the Quicktime plug-in from the list on the left. To get a description of each setting, simply hover the mouse cursor over a setting and a tool tip will be displayed.
FAQ
- What's the difference between the Apple Quicktime and Fusion Quicktime options?
- The Apple Quicktime renderer is more generic, but provides more general Quicktime options. The Fusion Quicktime renderer is more customizable (ie: using templates), but requires Eyeon's Fusion to render. It uses Fusion's scripting language (dfscript/eyeonscript) and the Fusion Render Node (dfrnode/renderslave) to generate the Quicktime.
- Which version of Apple Quicktime is required to create Quicktime movies with Deadline using the Apple Quicktime renderer?
- Apple Quicktime version 7.04 or later is required. It must be installed on all slaves that will be rendering Quicktime movies, as well as any machines from which Quicktime jobs will be submitted from. You can download the latest version of Quicktime from here.
- Can I submit an Apple Quicktime job from Windows to run on Mac OSX, or vice versa?
- No, because the export settings are saved out differently on each operating system. The Windows Quicktime generator doesn't recognize settings that are exported on a Mac, and vice versa. We hope to find a solution for this in the future, but for now you should ensure that your Quicktime job renders on the same operating system from which it was submitted from (using groups, pools, machine lists, etc).
- Which version of Eyeon's Fusion is required to create Quicktime movies with Deadline using the Fusion Quicktime renderer?
- The Fusion Quicktime Renderer has been tested with Fusion 4, 5, and 6.
- Can multiple machines work together to render a single movie file?
- No, this is not possible. This is why Quicktime Generation jobs should always consist of a single task that contains all the frames to be included in the movie file.
- When submitting an Apple Quicktime, an error message pops up when I click the Submit button.
- This error pops up when you have an older version of Apple Quicktime installed. Installing the latest version should fix the problem.
Error Messages And Meanings
This is a collection of known Quicktime Generation error messages and their meanings, as well as possible solutions. We want to keep this list as up to date as possible, so if you run into an error message that isn't listed here, please email Deadline Support and let us know.
- Exception during render: Error: Class not registered - Make sure that QuickTime version 7.04 or later is installed on this machine
- This error occurs when you have an older version of Apple Quicktime installed. Installing the latest version should fix the problem.
- Exception during render: Renderer returned non-zero error code, 128
- The Apple Quicktime renderer is crashing for some reason. Check to make sure you have the latest version of Apple Quicktime installed.