CGRU Forum

After Effects has a very useful feature that pretty much no other renderer offers: the ability to detect if a frame exists already, and skip re-rendering it if it does. While most renderers cannot have their current frame range reassigned without re-launching, a lot of them are able to accept a list of frames vs. a single range, so it would be somewhat trivial for CGRU to keep track of what frames have been successfully rendered so far on a job (or scan the destination folder to look for existing outputs) and to feed a frames list that skips over these existing files.

Adding this ability to CGRU would mean that we could re-queue a task without having to re-render any frames, so no work would ever be lost if we had to restart a frozen task or change the chunk size and restart tasks so that we get more machines rendering when the farm is not too busy.

This is already done.
Service can skip on afrender side by any custom reason.
Such reason as task file exist, already implemented in CGRU.

Is this documented anywhere? Would love to get this set up, as it will make it safer to re-queue stalled tasks etc.

Hey Timur, I see "af.Block.skipExistingFiles" in the docs, but am wondering if this is currently exposed to users in either Watch or WebGUI? I've been looking for it to see if I can use it to solve some of our render issues but am not seeing it as a user-facing variable that can be updated?

You can manipulate this flag only on a job creation.
Such function in GUIs is not implemented.

Hi, noob here.
Is it possible to specify the "af.Block.skipExistingFiles" flag to skip existing frames somewhere in the bottom command box of the starter GUI?

Hi!
Yes, it is written on PySide (Python + Qt) and it is not a big deal to add an extra option.