Hey, that's good news, congratulations!

Cheers,
Mike

USB seems to be performing a lot better. The Macs were still running fine this morning. Strange how the Linux nodes have never caused this much trouble

It is, the number of digits and the frame format needs to be set manually in the exrTrader GUI to match the output settings of LW.
exrTrader can only read out the path and base file name, but not the format used by LW to build the final file name.
That could well be. USB should be fine, OSX on intel CPUs handles those just as quickly now as FW drives (if you run Leopard).

One thing that might help is getting a cheap SOHO NAS... you can get cases for two 3.5" drives (that allows for a mirror) for around 200€, plunk in two 500GB drives and you're at less that 400€. Not ideal but maybe more reliable (plus they use a lot less energy if they run 24/7).

Cheers,
Mike

My problems still continue and I'm somewhat at a loss to explain them. One of the issues is a problem in exrTrader

- SNC4 loops the same frame over and over again because exrTrader defaults to writing out frmXXX files, but LW seems to (for me) output frmXXXX files. The dummy saver and the image filter saver don't agree, so SNC believes the node has crashed and requests the same frame to render. I'm not sure if this is an SDK limitation - Mike?

My more serious issue is that the Mac Mini, serving as a general workhorse (file server, LWSN node) stops responding to any fileshare activity after around 3-6 hours. It's wired into the router and still responds to VNC requests, but other than that it's dead - the machine actually won't reboot either in these situations, needing a hard power off. Commonly, the last line to be seen on the terminal is exrTrader throwing an exception because the file data cannot be written (to a local drive!). The MBP LWSN render naturally wedges at the same point because the location is no longer responding over the network. Argh.

I'm scratching my head over this whole thing. I thought a wired connection would resolve this, but it seems to be a more fundamental problem. I'm going to try a lengthy render without exrTrader just in case. I'll also try mode 3 LWSN renders on both machines to see if it is provoked that way. I also need to see if the firewire interface on the main storage drive is playing with me - moving the drive over to a USB port may help....I need to check. I'm halfway wondering if there's something being provoked by the drive going to sleep and not responding in a timely manner (the drive does this itself - OS X's energy savings on the Mac Mini are all switched off, except for display sleep).

*mutter*

I'm not sure if this is an OS X oddity either.

SpinQuad has published part two of a two part tutorial on working with render buffers in LightWave 3D.

Professional Production Pipeline 2. Practical Applications of Render Buffers.

It covers using exrTrader exported buffers with Fusion, but the workflow is applicable to all compositing packages with decent OpenEXR support.

Cheers,
Mike

*phew* 

You're welcome

Cheers,
Mike

BNR had a bug that caused this problem. Paul Lord sent me a patch and it fixed this problem on our pipeline. I assume it will be incorporated in the next release.

Move along, there is nothing to see here. 

Thanks,

Mike

ZPI should work with both... Fnordware use the latest openEXR library as well (and ZIP hase been there for ages). Does uncompressed work?

Otherwise you might need to send a sample image for Fnordware to check out.

Cheers,
Mike

Hey Mike

Trying to get this to work with the MAC versions and having problems!

I used the ZIP compression method which works perfectly on the PC, but you get a bunch of stars (*) next to the extra channels on the MAC. I tried a different format, but then I got the stars!

What I'm after is a compression that will work with both - any ideas?

Hi Mike, I had a look here and it works with 9.3.1 as expected... Now, the question is... can your nodes actually access the plugin? Maybe you could check the plugin config file used by the nodes to see if it contains exrTrader, and check if the nodes can access the plugin as well.

Cheers,
Mike