3ds Max :: Video Post To Backburner Network Render Hangs

Video Post to Backburner network render hangs on next frame..I use Max’s Video Post to setup my render sequences to submit them to backburner. There are a couple issues with video post but not as bad as the one I have now. Each time I setup a render and submit it to backburner the first frame assigned to each system will render fine but then the servers get hung-up “waiting for frame” and consume ALL of the available RAM. Of course if I don’t do network render, the video post runs without a hitch. That of course defeats the purpose of having a render farm that video post SHOULD be able to use. And also, if I go through the ‘render’ dialog box, and do network rendering, I can get each series of frames done as well but it’s not as clean and orderly as with video post.

Oddly enough, in Max 2009, all of this worked just fine. Ever since they (autodesk) fixed (broke) backburner in 2012 video post has never been the same. Since I am a lowly low budget animator, video post was a bonus in 2009 for having everything in one bundle for mixing and matching multiple views and inputs with overlays for production. It was great! One could set it and forget it overnight and in the AM all that was left was compile the images to sequenced avi. Alas, that has been somewhat limited now in that you can only render the views that are active, so max of 4 views or cameras (if this has changed for others pls let me know). Annoying especially if you forget to have a single camera active and set the render and it then hangs on it… no visual error saying such and such is missing just dumb blank screen (sometimes).

Another oddity, after saving a video post layout, if I open that file on a secondary system for edits, the video post will have blanks for file outputs. I’ll then have to re-point the outputs to be able to use the limited video post functionality. A pain and can deal with it but still, the outputs are all on networked drives (all mapped to same drive letter etc) and ever if I direct it straight through the network they go blank; i.e. \serversharediretoryoutputs

I’m attaching a simple ‘teapot race’ max file that exhibits the same problem of the video post on render fails just in case it’s a file setup issue.Also find below the log file outputs of a system during the aforementioned hanging render sequence. , I was running the debug and the log shows max hanging on the ‘waiting for frame’ then eventually dumps the job, reloads, does 1 frame, then hangs again for 10-15mins.