Allow for frame chunking at the application level

[gregdenton]

By default we only have the #IFRAME# replacement token, which limits our ability to do frame chunking in the application (executing a single command with a frame range, so we only incur the application startup cost once).
It would be nice to have a start and end frame token exposed by default in pyoutline making this functionality at least work for Maya and Nuke.

[donalm]

How should I create a single layer to run only one task for an entire frame range - say for example I want the last layer of my job to run one process that consumes all the frames rendered in the previous layer to:

• generate a movie from rendered frames or
• publish frames or
• cat and bzip the frames for transfer

I guess I can:

• set the 'frame spec' to 1
• assign the 'postprocess' service to the layer
• hardcode the real frame range into the command before I hand it off to OpenCue

Is that the best approach for now?

Thanks

[gregdenton]

Hi @donalm.
Yes, the approach you describe is the current best practice. Are you using outlines for the job submission? It is a little more manageable baking the command with frame range in the outline file, but as you point out still not ideal.

[donalm]

I just started testing again with CueSubmit - my wee module for submitting via Outlines has suffered from bit rot but sure I'll get that running again in the next day or two.

Thanks @gregdenton - we're still at a fairly early/loose stage of testing so I'm not too stressed about a few rough edges at this stage.

[donalm]

Might be some overlap here with #83

[bcipriano]

These tokens exist now, added in #597