Render Failing - MSG = "COLOUR : Initializing"

[CB_Vancity]

Uggg... this is my worst nightmare today.

I am on an older machine and I am not on support.  [Smoke Advanced 2013.2.0]

All of last week I have been working on some fairly major comp shots, which I haven't done in a long time.  Anyways after getting the hang of things last week I set the machine to render my BFX on friday evening and left it over the weekend.  When I came in this morning it had not rendered and the cacheing was acting a little weird.  After several reboots the cache seems to be working again, but it crashes whenever I go to render either of my comps (nearly identical setups).

The machine freezes while rendering the first frame and the message in the lower left says...

COLOUR : Initialising

and that's it, it will not respond after this point.

I was able to find this same message in the most recent log file smoke20132_lustre_app.log

[notice] 2422862544 messageAccumulator.C:291 02/17/14:13:19:25.081 Rendering: Batch FX - frame 0 of 118 - 00:00.
[notice] 1353996608 CoThreadPthread.C:200 02/17/14:13:19:25.164 Registered thread 'MepDispatcher' [ 1353996608 ]
[notice] 1087641920 CoMsgLogger.cpp:211 02/17/14:13:19:33.860 Last entry repeated 6 more times.
[notice] 2422862544 messageAccumulator.C:291 02/17/14:13:19:33.860 COLOUR : Initialising.
[notice] 1353996608 CoThreadPthread.C:200 02/17/14:13:19:34.469 Registered thread 'MepDispatcher' [ 1353996608 ]

I can rebuild my comp from my BFX saved setups, but as soon as I try to render I get the same issue.

Has anyone out there seen this before?  Is it a Colour corrector node somewhere that is unhappy?

Any insights would be appreciated hugely!

Cheers & thanks,

_Chris

Oh yeah, I almost forgot, I can't seem to find the release notes documentation on the service packs for 2013.2 anywhere.  I keep getting 404 pages on the autodesk site.  Anyone seen those around?  If it is a known bug I would like to pressure the money people here to finally give me the time to install the service packs, or better yet, get back on support!

[CB_Vancity]

That's good to know Robert.

I'm glad I learned something new yesterday.  

Cheers & Thanks Again!

_Chris

[Robert.Adam]

My pleasure! 🙂

best regards,

Robert.

[CB_Vancity]

Hi Robert, I just wanted to say thanks again for helping me through this.  It was reall good to learn how to pick apart a saved batch setup to try and salvage it.

It turns out that it might not have been the fault of the action node necessarily, not in the way I thought anyway.  I continued having problems after my last post, but I was able to replace the action node to fix it each time, so I didn't bother posting that.  Anyways, I eventually turned cache off for all the nodes that I was using it on and suddenly the system wasn't locking up anymore.  It must be hitting an error because it has to rebuild the node cache after a reboot?  Anyways, now that the project is done, I tried turning the cache back on for some of the nodes which I was using it on and when I did that it started locking up whenever I tried to open that BFX.

I found this in the fixed bugs list for 2013.2.3, which I am making time to install next week.

FLPR-5611 Batch Action node clears node cache in upstream node.

It seems likely that having cache enabled for my action node is what was causing my problems.

Too bad I only figured that out after the project was over.  <sigh>

Anyways, thanks again for your help.

Cheers!

_Chris

[Robert.Adam]

Hi Chris.

Glad I was able to help. I remember having tried to disable caching but to no avail.

Regards,

Robert.

[CB_Vancity]

Interesting, I wonder why it seems to have made such a big difference here.

Just out of curiosity, is it possible to open up a file in /project/batch/ and turn off the cache tags?

[Robert.Adam]

I have asked the devs and will let you know if there's any way to do that. I don't know of any.

There are _Cache_.000.clib files under /usr/discreet/clip/<storage>/<project>/<workspace>/ that contain the actual cached frames. Renaming or removing that library empties cache for all nodes but does not disable the cache setting.

I'll let you know when I get an answer.

Regards,

Robert.