[feynman]

To bump the SLs on a series of stills, I added them in the MNM to be resumed with 30 minutes render time each (time and resume specified in the wizard). The first 5 jobs were happily resumed and finished one after the other - but then the 6th file was being re-rendered over and over again for 30 minutes since lunch time :[

It's like the whole shebang got stuck at that job; rendering never progressed onto the pending jobs.

Any ideas? Many thanks in advance!

[Mihai]

Did the 6th one have send dependencies checked or unchecked?

[feynman]

Thanks for replyin'... I always leave send dependencies checked since beginning to use MR in January, having read about the issues that might occur if left unchecked. Over the last 10 days, it happened twice that a cooperative render got again stuck in an endless(?) re-rendering loop. Otherwise, everything's fine - apart from images often turning out at 8bpc, although 16bpc were explicitly selected in the job wizard.

[Mihai]

Maybe it stopped when the time limit was reached instead of the SL...

[feynman]

It writes the finished image after reaching 100 minutes render time (with the SL set to 21 which it never reaches - hence later resuming if worth it depending on noise) and, instead of progressing to the next pending job, just sets about re-rendering. Happened three times now in 10 days, twice with a resumed render, once with a regular one...

[Mihai]

If you set it to stop instead by SL I think the problem will go away.

[feynman]

I see, but - what if timed stop (to resume later in case there's more render time) is more important than stopping by SL? As far as I understand, I can never know how long a render will take to reach a certain SL. If, for example, I set up 6 jobs to stop at SL 19 (knowing that SL 16,504 has been reached after 70 minutes rendering with the first render), then I don't know if all will be finished in the morning, because going to SL 19 may require an additional full day? If I set my jobs to 100 minutes, I know for sure I have 6 acceptable finished jobs in the morning...

[Mihai]

It's just that there is a problem with coop render if they stop with time, but the final SL you've set hasn't been reached. Network thinks that job still needs to go and so restarts the same job....

But you can still get what you want by SL, I mean if you set them to something where most scenes will be acceptable - like SL 16. If you set any scene at any resolution to render for say 100 min, then it's not really sure you will have any acceptable renders in the morning. Depending on resolution/difficulty of lighting, some maybe need 20 min, others 200, to reach an high enough SL where most of it is clean (around SL 15-17).