Archive notice: This article was originally published on January 12, 2015. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Cloud Work
By incorporating the Virtual Machine Extension, private and public cloud systems can be used with Deadline 7. Practical for artists, architects, or engineers working from anywhere. The tool supports Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, the Google Cloud Platform, OpenStack, and many more. Users can employ different cloud solutions simultaneously as well as together with traditional rendering methods.
Jigsaw Support
For Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max, The Foundry’s Modo and McNeel’s Rhino, the "Jigsaw" feature has been dded, allowing rendering work to be completed much faster by dividing it among different render nodes.
Draft 1.2
With Deadline 7, Thinkbox Software introduces Draft 1.2, an update to the plug-in for compositing and video processing. Draft makes it possible to automate typical post-render tasks such as image-format conversions and the creation of animated videos, QuickTimes, or watermarks on exported content. Support for OpenColorIO, ASC CDL LUT, and Unicode has also been added.
MongoDB, New UI and ftrack
In addition, Deadline now uses the MongoDB database in version 2.6 and thus supports database partitioning through sharding, enabling greater horizontal scaling. The user interface has also been improved by dding the Qt and PyQt libraries in version 5. ftrack, as a new component of Deadline, enables a seamless render and review data flow.
Support for New Tools
In version 7, new programs are also capable of working with Deadline: Adobe After Effects CC, Solid Angle’s Arnold for Houdini, Maxon Cinema 4D R16, Corona SDK from Corona Labs, Blackmagic Design Fusion 7, The Foundry’s Nuke 9, and Next Limit Technologies RealFlow 2014.
Further features include slave scheduling and idle detection, as well as local slave control and the ability to share slave licences.
All further information about Deadline 7 can be found here. Deadline is available for Windows, Linux, and Max OSX. Pricing information is available from Thinkbox Software’s sales department.
Thinkbox Software has published a series of YouTube videos about Deadline 7.
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