Blender work is not a shot submission: no Export, no version, no
validation, QC or delivery. It is "Ctrl+F12, but on the farm", so it is
modelled as what it is — a queue entry and nothing more.
That turned out to need very little. Claim, progress, fail and
complete-render already tolerated a job with no Export behind them, so a
Blender job reuses the whole lifecycle; RenderJob gains projectId, label
and submittedBy so a job with no shot code still has something to show.
Capability gating is new and was already missing: the claim now filters
job types by the machine's reported tools. Without it a workstation
without Blender would claim Blender work and fail it repeatedly, burning
the attempts while a machine that could have rendered it sat idle. The
worker asks for Blender jobs unconditionally and the server refuses them
— trusting the worker to self-select would have left the same hole.
The runner treats a clean exit with no saved frames as a failure:
Blender exits 0 when a frame range is empty or an output path is
unwritable, and a job that silently rendered nothing is the worst
outcome available.
Standalone jobs auto-requeue on a transient failure like any other work;
delivery builds are deliberately excluded, since a half-written package
wants a human first.
Adds the Blender add-on (BlenderPanel/) and its docs. The add-on refuses
to submit an unsaved file — the farm opens the .blend from disk, so
unsaved changes would render the previous state without warning. Its
payload is pinned by a contract test, since add-on and server only ever
meet over JSON.
Worker 1.5.0. Adds migration 20260815000000_blender_render_jobs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Initialise Workspace built UNG_101..UNG_117 from a hardcoded range and
imported one hardcoded AEP, and fourteen findComp calls named UNG's comps
literally. None of it worked for a second show.
Comp names now follow a convention derived from the show id —
{showId}_VFX_OVERLAY, {showId}_EXPORT_TEMPLATE, _SHOW LUT — which
reproduces UNG's existing names exactly, so nothing changes for the show
it was written for. A project whose template departs from the pattern can
override any of the three.
Paths cannot be derived: UNG's show id is UNG while its folder is
UNGO_VFX. Those live on Project.pipelineConfig and are edited under
Project → Settings → Pipeline. They are resolved server-side and handed
to the panel with the project list, and read by buildPreviewManifest for
the headless build, so the panel and the farm cannot disagree about which
template — or which show LUT — a shot was built with. That mattered more
than the folder names: a preview rendered through another show's LUT is
quietly the wrong colour rather than obviously broken.
Episode folders come from the project's episode list, falling back to the
folders under its footage root for a show whose episodes are not entered
yet.
Panel 2.5.0. Adds migration 20260814010000_project_pipeline_config.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Overriding a failed validation queued the preview at priority 50
regardless. It took its rank from the export's last PREVIEW_ONLY job —
but validation runs before the preview stage, so a VALIDATION_FAILED
export has never had one, and the missing row fell through to a
hardcoded normal priority. An urgent shot lost its urgency at exactly
the moment someone was standing over it waiting.
Every preview now derives its rank from the export's AE_RENDER priority
rather than from a previous preview. That fixes the missing-row case and
also removes a slow drift: a preview's priority is already boosted, so
re-deriving from it moved an export a step up the queue on every retry.
createPreviewJob takes the render priority and the attempt number, so the
first build, a retry, a regenerate and an override all rank identically.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Urgent already propagated — a preview inherits its render's priority, so
an urgent export stays ahead all the way to QC. The complaint was the
other half: at equal priority previews always ran last.
The queue orders by priority then age, and a preview job is only created
when its render finishes, so it is always newer than the renders queued
beside it. Ten shots ran as ten renders and then ten previews, and
nothing was reviewable until the end of the batch.
render.previewPriorityBoost (default 1) subtracts from the render's
priority when the preview is created, so a shot finishes end to end
before the next render starts. The boost never promotes a job across the
urgent threshold: a normal preview must not inherit permission to run
outside the render window that its render never had. Set it to 0 for the
old behaviour.
Worth knowing separately: a worker will not claim preview jobs at all
while an artist has AE open on that machine, which during the day is the
larger reason previews appear to wait.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Some exports are deliberately framed differently from their review —
unscaled or un-punched-in EXRs — and a preview rebuilt from those frames
would be the wrong picture. The previous export's MOV is the correct one.
skipPreview renders the EXRs and goes straight to READY_FOR_QC. Available
at Queue Export (a "No preview" checkbox in the panel, E1 field) and as an
option when overriding a validation failure.
The inheritance is as important as the skip: deliveryMovPath, the review
MP4, the thumbnail and the Version are carried over from the newest
earlier export of that shot which has them. Without it the delivery
builder — which takes its MOV from deliveryMovPath — would package EXRs
with no MOV at all. Where there is nothing to inherit, the export still
reaches QC and the timeline says it has no review media.
QC is untouched by any of this: a skipped preview still needs a human
pass before the export can be delivered.
Panel 2.3.0. Adds migration 20260814000000_export_skip_preview.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Checks fail on renders that are genuinely fine — a plate the engine
cannot reach, an expectation that does not apply to this shot — and a
VALIDATION_FAILED export was a dead end, blocking delivery on a shot a
human can see is correct.
Override validation on the Export detail page resumes the pipeline where
a pass would have handed off: preview, then READY_FOR_QC. It never skips
QC and never delivers directly, so the frames are still looked at — the
override waives the automated check, not the human one.
The failed ValidationResult rows are left untouched rather than rewritten,
so the QC queue keeps listing them as warnings and whoever QCs the shot
sees what was waved through. The reason is required and recorded with the
checks it covered on the export's timeline, and the validation panel
keeps an "overridden" badge long after the event scrolls away.
Restricted to admin/producer/supervisor: waving a failed check through is
a supervisor's call.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A 25-shot episode took about an hour to package when the linking itself
is instant. All of it was verification: every delivered file was read
back and hashed, and at ~100 MB/s over SMB one 2.8 GB shot costs 30 s.
Re-hashing a hard link cannot disagree with validation. The entry is a
second name for the same data, so it re-reads the exact bytes that were
already hashed — half an hour per episode to prove something that cannot
be false. Verification is now proportional to what was actually done:
copies are read back in full, links carry over the validation-time digest.
Linking has one gap hashing covered incidentally: a source changed after
it passed QC, which a link would carry faithfully. Source timestamps are
now checked against the export's validation time, which costs a stat per
file rather than a full read.
"verifyMode": "always-hash" restores unconditional read-back for a
production that requires it.
Worker 1.3.0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The preview manifest now carries the show name, taken from the project's
name rather than its code — a slate is read by a human, so "Ungovernable"
beats "UNG_S1".
Both the worker's headless build and the panel's own preview set it, so a
farm-generated preview and an artist-built one still match. The panel
writes it whenever it touches an overlay, not only when building a
preview, so existing comps pick it up on the next Add Overlay.
The slate's other properties are title case ("Date", "Scene") while the
overlay's are upper ("DATE", "SHOT NAME"), so both spellings of SHOW are
attempted; a template exposing neither reports its actual property names
as a build warning rather than failing silently, matching how the VFX
Scope and Submission Note fields already behave.
Panel 2.2.0, worker 1.2.0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A render carries frame numbers in two unrelated systems. The comp is
anchored to its plate's timecode, so its timeline runs 1247792-1247896;
the output module names files from 1001. Validation compared the file
numbers against the comp range and failed every correctly-rendered shot
by ~1.2 million frames — first_frame, last_frame and missing_frames all
reporting a defect that was not there.
The manifest now carries outputFrameStart (the output module's starting
number, house convention 1001) alongside the comp range. Count and
contiguity are measured on the output numbering; first/last compare
against outputFrameStart and are SKIPPED on older manifests, where the
count and gap checks still hold on their own.
The same conflation broke the API timecode fallback: it anchored on the
comp's frameStart while the render's first frame is 1001, producing a
+1246791 frame "offset". Shot.timecodeStart is the edit in-point and the
plate carries handleFrames of head handle, so the reference is the API
value less handles, anchored on the render's own first frame.
Verified on the shot that reported it: UNG_107_051_010 v004 now passes
count, contiguity and a plate-anchored timecode match. Regression tests
cover both coordinate systems, including that a genuine +8 handle offset
still fails.
Panel 2.1.2.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"What is running where" was answerable only by asking someone. Each tool
now reports its own version on startup into a ToolVersion registry, shown
on Pipeline → Machines.
The worker's version moves out of config.json and into the assembly:
a hand-maintained string on each machine is exactly the thing that goes
stale, and a machine reporting a version it is not running is worse than
no version at all. publish.ps1 stamps the git SHA via SourceRevisionId,
so a deployed exe traces back to a commit (1.1.0+feb1c7b).
The panel gains PANEL_VERSION, shown in its title and every diagnostics
report, and pings on load.
Staleness is derived rather than declared: the newest version seen for a
tool is the benchmark, so updating one machine is what flags the rest.
There is no expected-version list to keep in sync — which would have been
one more thing to forget.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Completes RenderPipeline2 phases 3-5. Additive throughout: with
validation.enabled=false the pipeline behaves exactly as before.
Validation (§8) runs on the worker straight after a render, while it
still holds the job and the files are local. Everything is read from the
EXR header — one 64 KB read per sampled frame, no pixel decode — so the
engine needs no oiiotool. The render job deliberately stays open through
the stage, so a worker that dies there is reaped and retried instead of
stranding the export in VALIDATING.
Timecode is the primary check and is anchored on the plate, never the
API: measured on the live show, Shot.timecodeStart is the editorial
in-point and sits one handle-length (8f) ahead of the plate, so checking
against it would pass the defective exports and fail the correct ones.
Reference precedence is manifest timing plate -> plate found on disk ->
API value, and the API rank is WARN-only. The panel now resolves plate
provenance by walking the comp's own footage layers, so the worker never
guesses which element carries the comp's timing.
Verified against real studio renders via the new --validate mode: it
catches both defect classes seen in shipped work — the +8 handle offset
and frame-derived timecode (00:00:41:17 = frame 1001 at 24fps).
QC (§10) is one service behind two front doors, API-key for the panel
and session for the web. PASS means ready to upload and nothing else;
FAIL sets the comp task to CHANGES. The panel gains a QC section that
imports the real EXR sequence at full res rather than the H.264.
Delivery (§11) rides the existing queue as a DELIVERY_BUILD job: hard
links with a copy fallback, verification by re-hashing delivered bytes
against the validation-time digest, manifest.json and the CSV report.
fsutil hardlink list is unavailable over SMB, so link identity is never
queried — reading the bytes back covers links and copies alike.
Also fixes ApiClient.ProgressAsync throwing on transport failure, which
would have aborted work in flight during a brief server outage; progress
reporting is best-effort by contract.
Removes the stale RenderWorker/ rule from the root .gitignore. The
worker's source is tracked like the rest of the repo and its own
.gitignore already covers bin/, obj/ and publish/; the rule silently
excluded new files while the existing 20 stayed tracked.
Not yet applied: migration 20260813000000 was hand-written because the
dev database was unavailable — run prisma migrate deploy and verify
before relying on it. None of this has run against a live server.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A slate or burn-in mistake is usually caught after a preview has already
succeeded, and there was no way back: retryPreview required PREVIEW_FAILED, and
READY_FOR_QC only led on to QC_FAILED/READY_FOR_DELIVERY/SUPERSEDED. The only
recourse was a whole new export, re-rendering every EXR and burning a version
number to fix a typo.
- transitions: READY_FOR_QC and QC_FAILED can now go back to GENERATING_PREVIEW.
- regeneratePreview() rebuilds the manifest from scratch rather than patching
anything, so shot code, episode/scene, frame count, slate date and burn-ins
are all re-derived exactly as on a first-time preview. Validated EXRs are
reused and the version number is untouched -- this re-delivers the same
version, it does not make a new one.
- vfxScope and submissionNote are frozen onto the Export at submission time, so
regenerating refreshes that snapshot from the shot's slate fields (explicit
override wins, same precedence as createExport). Slate text edited on the web
app's Slate tab is therefore picked up.
- finalizePreview replaces the media on the export's existing Version instead of
stacking a second row, so the version number stays put and reviewer notes and
annotations survive the reslate. First-time previews are unaffected.
- POST /api/ext/exports/{id}/regenerate-preview exposes it to the panel.
- Panel: Regenerate Previews button, gated on the same statuses as the server,
with a confirm covering what is and is not reused.
Also fixes the slate description source: the Slate tab authors
shot.slateDescription (falling back to shot.description) but the preview
manifest only ever read shot.description, so edits made there never reached the
rendered slate.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
finalizePreview now retitles the export's task so its version suffix matches the
preview that was just uploaded (UNG_102_019_010_cmp_TT_v004 -> _v005), which is
the rename the manual batch upload already does on rename-and-upload. The new
nextTaskTitle helper mirrors nextExrOutputBase so the task title, EXR base and
preview filename all derive the suffix the same way. It uses the export's
versionString rather than versionNumber, since the DB number is bumped to stay
monotonic per task while the filename follows the shot's shotVersion.
The rename only fires when a Version was actually created, runs in the same
transaction, and is recorded in the ExportEvent note; the finalize response now
returns the task id, title and whether it changed. Task status is deliberately
untouched (pipeline renders must not resurface in the review flow, S10.0).
The headless preview build was addressing the slate's identity fields by index
only, so ShotName was never filled on the farm. setSlateIdentity writes both the
named property and the index -- the name-with-index-fallback pattern the panel
already uses for VersionName -- and warns with the template's actual property
names when neither resolves, instead of failing silently.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
One "Queue Export" click now renders the EXR sequence, then rebuilds the shot
headlessly with the studio slate/overlay template to produce the delivery MOV
and review MP4. Implements RenderPipeline2 phases 1-2 plus the preview stage.
Server:
- New models Export, RenderJob, ExportEvent, Machine, WorkerHeartbeat, plus
Project.deliveryConfig and per-submission slate fields (Export.vfxScope,
Export.submissionNote, inherited from the shot's previous export).
Both migrations are purely additive; no existing column is touched.
- lib/render-pipeline: server-enforced state machine, transactional version
increment with supersede, atomic FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED claim gated by
machine availability windows, and a lease reaper run from instrumentation.ts.
- /api/ext/* endpoints for the panel and workers; session-auth mirrors under
/api/render and /api/machines for the web UI.
- Pipeline pages: render queue, export detail, machine monitoring, plus an
Exports tab on shot detail.
RenderWorker (.NET 8 Windows service, new):
- Registration, heartbeat as cancel channel, claim loop, aerender runner with
progress parsing and stall watchdog, crash recovery and disk-spooled
reporting that survives server downtime.
- Preview stage: headless AE assembles the preview comp into a throwaway AEP
with both output modules queued, then a single aerender pass renders them.
Preview jobs are not claimed while an interactive AE session is open, so an
artist's project is never taken over.
AE panel: Queue Export with live status polling, urgent flag, retry, and the
VFX Scope / Submission Note fields. Every existing panel action is unchanged.
Preview chaining ships disabled behind SystemConfig preview.enabled.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
twotalesanimation