Deadline®

Installation and Upgrade Deployment:

• Optimized Install Procedure: Deadline® has gone through rigorous analysis to make the installation and configuration process smooth and efficient. A detailed document provides easy, step-by-step instructions explaining the various components that will be installed.
• Centralized Deployment of Upgrades: Deadline´s software has the ability to auto-upgrade the whole render farm from a centralized deployment–an incredible time-saver for large render farms.

Remote Control and Farm Administration:

• Remote Control: Start, stop and restart Deadline® slave remote instances–as well as the remote machine on which it is running–from within Deadline® Monitor and Deadline® Configuration.
• Remote Command Execution: Execute arbitrary command lines (i.e. applications, command line operations or batch files) on a single or group of remote machines.
• Simplified Remote Desktop Access: Deadline® integrates seamlessly with VNC, Remote Administrator, Remote Desktop Connection and Apple Remote Desktop to provide effortless remote access to desktops across the render farm.
• Slave Statistic Reporting: Deadline® Monitor displays many vital statistics for Deadline® networked machines: up-time, free disk space, available memory, CPU count, CPU speed, installed OS and service packs, IP address and more.

Plug-ins & 3rd Party Tools

• Wide Support For Rendering Packages (see below).
• Script SDK: Deadline® includes a Python script-based plug-in SDK, allowing users to create custom plug-ins.

Job Scheduling

• Groups: Jobs can be submitted to specific groups of slaves.
• Prioritized Pools: Jobs can be submitted to prioritized pools, each slave is configured with a list of pools sorted in order of priority.
• Numeric Priorities: Within its pool, each job is assigned a numeric value between 0 and 100 to represent its priority in the queue.
• Job and Plug-in Limit Groups: Jobs can be assigned limits to constrain the number of tasks that can be concurrently processed, or to control the amount of renderers with floating licenses.
• Rescheduling Jobs: All pool, priority and limit group settings can be changed later using Deadline® Monitor.
• Custom Scheduling: Customize scheduling to suit your pipeline–or use default scheduling based on pool, priority and submission time.

Network Rendering Made Easy

• Integrated Submission Dialogs: Deadline® offers integrated submission dialogs for 3ds Max, After Effects, Blender, Cinema 4D, Fusion, Generation, Houdini, Lightwave, Maya, Modo, Nuke, RealFlow, Softimage (XSI), and Toxik, providing a comfortable native environment for cross-application tasks.
• Render Completion Notification: Receive notice of job completion through either an automatic instant message notification or an e-mail notification to any number of watching users.

Access Control and Auditing

• Access Control: While full access is granted for all users to modify their own jobs, Deadline´s Access Control System prevents users from inadvertently disrupting other jobs. An optional password protected Super User mode allows for global network administration. Super Users can configure the types of actions available to each user on their jobs–including which individual job properties users can modify after a job as been submitted.
• Full slave and Job Auditing: Any command that affects a job, slave or task is logged along with the originating user name and machine. This allows everyone, including project managers and supervisors, to track changes and troubleshoot issues with confidence. It also encourages responsibility and cooperation on the part of Deadline® users.