Previews used to ship the full padded (handle-included) render to
clients, with an artist manually pulling picture lock and hand-trimming
the comp to match. The automated preview stage now trims the client
comp to the picture-lock edit itself (a fixed handle count off each
end, per the studio's existing convention) and separately builds an
ungraded, full-duration picture-lock reference MP4 as a diagnostic
sidecar to check back against. A new "No Picture Lock" panel checkbox
is the single override for shots where picture lock is missing or
wrong, falling back to today's untrimmed behavior.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 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>
The .NET 10 SDK cleans the publish directory, and an incremental build
then skips copying content into it — so a second publish produced a
package with the exe but no scripts\vfxr_build_preview.jsx. The exe loads
that script from its own folder at runtime, so the package would have
installed cleanly and failed every preview job.
The Content item now sets CopyToPublishDirectory explicitly
(CopyToOutputDirectory only governs the build folder), and publish.ps1
copies the script itself rather than trusting the SDK, keeping the
existing verification as the backstop that caught this.
Verified by publishing twice in a row: the incremental second run, which
previously failed, now produces a complete package and zip.
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>
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>
Adds scripts/publish.ps1, which produces a self-contained single-file exe plus
the headless AE build script, optionally zipped for copying to a render machine.
Adds `VFXReviewWorker.exe --check`: resolves every configured path, confirms
aerender/AfterFX/the build script exist, verifies each pathMappings target is
reachable from that machine, and pings the server to confirm the API key is
accepted — exiting non-zero if anything would stop the worker running. Catches
a wrong path at install time rather than in the logs later.
Verified from the published binary: the single-file exe resolves its scripts
folder correctly, so the preview build script ships alongside the exe rather
than embedded and can be patched without a rebuild.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 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>
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