ffmpeg was started with stdout and stderr redirected and neither pipe ever
read. Windows gives an anonymous pipe a ~4 KB buffer, which ffmpeg's banner
and stream summary exceed on their own, so it blocked forever on the write,
never exited, and the two-minute cap fired:
TaskCanceledException at Process.WaitForExitAsync
Preview complete for job ... in 221s (mov + mp4)
The exception was swallowed as "non-fatal", so every preview silently
produced no thumbnail while paying 120s for the privilege. Nothing
downstream was wrong — there was simply never a thumbnail to promote.
Both pipes are now drained concurrently before the wait. A timeout kills the
process tree rather than leaking an ffmpeg per job, and attempts report a
three-way outcome so a hung or unstartable ffmpeg is not retried — without
that, the slate fallback would have doubled the wasted time to four minutes.
Failures are no longer silent: an unset or missing ffmpegPath, the seek that
was chosen, and ffmpeg's own exit code, command and stderr are all logged.
finalizePreview likewise records every promotion outcome on the export
timeline, not just success. Silence there was indistinguishable from a broken
worker, a project whose flag never saved, and the feature working as
configured — which is what made this take so long to find.
Adds scripts/diagnose-thumbnails.mjs, which walks the chain (ffmpeg →
Export.thumbnailKey → project flag → Shot.generatedThumbnailUrl → what the UI
resolves) and names the first broken link.
Worker 1.5.1 -> 1.5.2; republish required for the fix to take effect.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two independent features landing together:
Generated shot thumbnails — a shot can now carry a thumbnail promoted
from a render export (Shot.generatedThumbnailUrl/generatedThumbnailFrom)
alongside the existing brief-supplied thumbnailUrl, which always takes
display precedence (lib/shot-thumbnail.ts) so a promoted frame can only
ever fill a gap, never overwrite the brief. Shows with
pipelineConfig.autoShotThumbnail promote automatically on every
finished export (lib/render-pipeline/preview.ts); promoteExportThumbnail/
clearGeneratedThumbnail (actions/shots.ts) are the manual equivalent for
everyone else. Worker-side seek logic for picking the promoted frame is
covered by RenderWorker/VFXReviewWorker.Tests/ThumbnailSeekTests.cs.
Bulk shot delete — the shot-status page's selection bar gets a "Bulk
Actions" dropdown (alongside the existing Change Due Date) with Delete
Shots. bulkDeleteShots() (actions/shots.ts) deletes one at a time rather
than in a single statement: exports_shotId_fkey is ON DELETE RESTRICT
by design, so a shot with renders or deliveries on record is protected
and gets skipped and reported by name rather than aborting the whole
selection or being silently destroyed along with its history.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Clients sometimes ship footage under a naming convention that doesn't
match our own shot codes. Adds an optional Shot.clientCode, editable on
the Slate tab: when set, it replaces shotCode only in what the client
actually sees — slate identity, overlay burn-in, and delivered EXR/MOV
file and folder names in Netflix packages — with our own version string
flatly appended (no "_cmp_TT_" studio jargon mixed in). Internal render
paths, EXR filenames on the SAN, comp names, and DB lookups are
untouched. Shots without a client code render identically to before.
Delivery packages denormalize clientCode at build time, same as the
existing shotCode/versionString snapshot, so a later shot edit can't
retroactively change already-built delivery history. The worker now
renames delivered EXR frames and the delivery MOV using the existing
frame-number parser (SequencePattern) so only the base name changes —
frame numbers and padding survive exactly. This is the one piece of the
change that could plausibly ship the wrong bytes, so it's covered by
new unit tests (renaming, padding, MOV rename, checksum-survives-rename,
and a graceful fallback for an unparseable frame number) rather than
resting on manual verification alone.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Production fallout after enabling it: the trimmed EXR footage started
after the head handle as intended, but the overlay's burn-in timecode
(hardcoded to start at frame 1001) did not shift with it, so the
delivered burn-in no longer matched the footage. The picture-lock
reference render also never worked correctly in practice. Reverts the
AE panel checkbox, the preview-build script's trim/reference logic, and
the server/worker plumbing around it back to their pre-feature state
(82dfaee) — untrimmed previews, no picture-lock reference, overlay
timecode correct again.
The noPictureLock/piclockRefKey schema columns and their migration are
deliberately left in place: they're already applied in production, and
dropping an applied migration's file risks the next `prisma migrate
deploy`. They sit unused and harmless until this is revisited.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Manipulating startTime/outPoint on previewComp's SHOT layer touched a
comp duplicated from the artist-authored template, whose slate/shot
timing relationship the build script doesn't own -- and it dropped the
slate frame in production. The trim now happens one level down, on the
private single-layer footage precomp this script fully controls;
previewComp's own sizing logic is untouched from before this feature
existed, since it already generalizes correctly to any shotComp
duration.
Also threads the picture-lock skip reason through to the export's
timeline, so a shot missing sequence timecodes or a matching picture
lock file is visible without digging into worker-machine logs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
A FAILED delivery item never sets fileCount/totalBytes, and the worker's
Dictionary-based JSON payload serializes those as explicit nulls (the
WhenWritingNull option only suppresses nulls on POCO properties, not
dictionary values). The server's schema allowed the fields to be omitted
but not null, so the report was permanently rejected with 422 - and the
worker only ever treated 409/404 as terminal, so it retried the same
malformed payload forever across restarts.
Blender renders failed with "produced no output for 600s" on every
attempt while rendering perfectly well.
Two causes, both mine. BeginOutputReadLine raises an event per newline,
and Blender writes its render status with a carriage return so it
overwrites one line in place — a frame taking longer than the stall
timeout emits no newline for its whole duration. stdout is now read as a
character stream with CR and LF both ending a line.
The watchdog was also stricter than its own message: it only accepted a
recognised Fra:/Saved: line as a sign of life, so any output we were not
parsing counted as silence. Any output now proves Blender is alive, which
is what "produced no output" is asking; finished frames still drive
progress, since a single frame emits hundreds of status updates.
Also passes -noaudio: a render node has no sound device, and initialising
audio under a session-less service account is a known way to hang.
Covered by tests over a realistic stdout chunk where progress is
CR-separated and only the saved lines end in LF — newline-only splitting
yields one unusable blob and no progress at all.
Worker 1.5.1.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
Shot.fps existed, the lookup API returned it, and one button honoured it
— Set Start Timecode — while the shot builder ignored it entirely. Comps
were created at 24 and every plate conformed to 24.
DH2 is a 25 fps show. Its plates carry framesPerSecond 25/1, so comps
built at 24 conform every plate to the wrong speed and compute every
frame-from-timecode sum against the wrong rate.
The builder now takes the rate from the shot record, which is the show's
delivery rate and therefore the authority; a plate's own rate is whatever
happens to be on disk. Import Renders follows the comp it imports into,
and Import EXR follows the shot.
Validation gains plate_fps, comparing the render against the timing
plate. timecode_fps only compares the render to its manifest and both
come from the comp, so a shot built at the wrong rate agrees with itself
and passes; the plate is the independent witness. It is a WARN, never a
FAIL: sampling DH2 found one plate at 50 fps against a 25 fps show, a
deliberate over-crank, so a whole-number multiple is reported as exactly
that and anything else as a probable rate mistake.
Note this does not fix the data: all 175 DH2 shots still carry fps 24
from the create-time default and need correcting before their comps are
rebuilt.
Panel 2.4.0, worker 1.4.0.
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>
UNG_110_030_010 v002 failed with a 461614-frame offset on a render whose
timecode was correct. Two causes, both in how the plate reference was
recorded.
The comp held three same-length elements and the timing plate was picked
by duration alone, so a PRERENDER won on layer order. Using a pre-render
as the timecode reference is circular anyway: it was rendered from this
comp, so it can only ever agree with it — including when both are wrong.
Only footage under the Footage Root is now eligible; among those, longest
still wins.
The offset itself came from the plate's frameStart. AE writes renders as
"..._PRERENDER_01001.exr" while delivered plates use "....01001.exr", and
the parser only handled the dot form, so the number fell back to the
comp's frame range — 462615 against a render numbered from 1001. Both
separators now parse, and an unparseable name omits the field rather than
filling it with a number from the wrong coordinate system.
Verified against the real manifest: the BG01 plate is now chosen over
both pre-renders, and all three filenames parse to 1001.
Panel 2.2.1, worker 1.2.1.
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>
RenderPipeline2.md §11 carries the design and the normative rules, but
there was nothing telling someone how to actually build and ship a
package. DELIVERY_WORKFLOW.md covers the path from "QC passed" to "client
has it": eligibility, building, what lands on disk, verification and its
failure modes, marking delivered, and configuration.
It explains hard links properly — a second name for the same data, not a
copy or a shortcut — since that is the part most likely to worry someone
looking at a package that appeared instantly and used no disk.
Also documents the DELIVERY_BUILD stage in the worker README, which
previously mentioned deliveries only in passing, and adds a
documentation index to the root README.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The 29 MB VFXReviewWorker_<date>.zip was swept into the previous commit
by the .gitignore change that started tracking worker source. It is a
build artifact: reproducible from any commit via scripts/publish.ps1,
and the version stamp (1.1.0+a4f8226) already traces a deployed exe back
to its source, so the zip carries no information the repo lacks — while
costing ~29 MB of permanent history per publish.
Untracked and ignored. The file stays on disk for copying to
workstations; only git stops following it.
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>
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>
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>
twotalesanimation