I suspect it has to do with the behaviour of Path.resolve() (doc). AFAIK on Windows it also "resolves" mapped drive letters to their \\SERVER\share\path\to\file notation, which is a pain in the rear end.

I have discovered that the error during the job submission can be prevented if "Relative paths only" is turned on in the Blender Cloud settings. I am not sure if that will introduce other issues, or if this is on by default, but it appears that it addresses the issue.

Error is still occurring for both 2.79 and 2.80, but only when a WAV file is in the video sequencer and I try to submit to Flamenco. The .blend files don't submit and get an error as below, with the display in the Flamenco Render tab reading "Found asset Narration-Audio.wav" when it stops packing. All files submit properly once the audio track has been removed, which is an acceptable workaround for me.

@Joel Howe (jhowe) can you try with this BAT wheel file? Just remove any exist blender_asset_tracer*.whl file from the wheels directory of the Blender Cloud add-on, then put this one in place and restart Blender.

D:/ is a local physical data drive on my main Win 10 workstation.
R:/ is the Flamenco project.
R:/ is a network mapped folder location to D:/Flamenco, so in the case of submitting the job, R:/ points to the same hard drive. R:/ was created using Windows "Map network drive", which I don't believe allows you to specify a protocol.
All Flamenco workers have an R:/ mapped back to my workstation, which is also running Flamenco manager.
Inside R:/ are three folders:

In T65726#699782, @Sybren A. Stüvel (sybren) wrote:

It would also help to know the layout of your files. What directory is set as the project directory? You're using drive R:, is that a network drive (if so, which protocol?) or a local disk?

I have been able to successfully submit to Flamenco a version of the file that has the object with an Ocean modifier, but only when the Cache path for that modifier was empty.

Adding a sound file to the sequencer in an empty .blend file was enough to reproduce the error for me, but I am attaching this actual file. This file has the proprietary elements removed, including the WAV file in the sequencer. To get this to submit to Flamenco without error, I have to delete the WAV audio and both the Alembic fluid surface and the Ocean modifier fluid surface.

Please give us files we can use to reproduce the issue. The blend file you uploaded packs just fine, albeit with warnings about missing files.

In T65726#699528, @Sybren A. Stüvel (sybren) wrote:

Which version of the Blender Cloud add-on was used?

Which version of the Blender Cloud add-on was used?

Nope, deletion of those jobs is impossible for a reason. When the job is in that status, its tasks are being created by Flamenco Server, and nobody else should be touching the job.

I think it's need to have ability to remove jobs in 'under-construction' status, anyway, even if it will be fixed.

Implemented in ff9624d4f37ab035c27d1d5c59c654f88656ad49 (Blender Cloud add-on) and 5f96d2e50b852dcc1bd350dafc72dea67e02983e (Flamenco Server).

Implemented in 7bbbe3c (auto-delete offline workers) and c52c65d (allow auto-deletion in configurable status)

Committed in 4fe11d99f6a00a7fdb0ff2d4a85eacb37051db84

Yes it helps. Looks like i can launch it now.

Please try [Flamenco Manager 2.4-dev6](flamenco.io/download/flamenco-manager-2.4-dev6-linux.tar.gz). If you go to setup mode (./flamenco-manager -verbose -setup) and re-save your configuration, it should automagically remove the variable-name variable for you.

I can confirm the first issue; there is a regression bug in Flamenco Manager 2.3 that causes this duplicate variable.

There are two things wrong:

It now shows 5 KiB of 'head' and 10 KiB of 'tail', except when accessing the URL with WGet/Curl, in which case it downloads the entire log file. See log_server.go.

I was looking into something like this for the create-video task in the blender-render job compiler for the server. I want to be able to set the ffmpeg arguments that are being used to create the resulting video. As I was digging into this, I thought that using a variable override in the manager, similar to the path override for ffmpeg, could allow for at least making the output file an MP4 vs MKV. Is this barking up the wrong tree?

In e47780a63378e6aa664ba69566323a6396b798eb I changed the Manager so that soft-failed tasks are treated similarly to queued tasks. They are now retried by other workers as you'd expect.

'Normal' is fine, I'll look into it.

I'm guessing I can mart this as normal as this is a blender studio issue (?)

Alternatively offer JPEG2000 as only option (supports Alpha).

Implemented as the 2nd option (open blend file, create scene, fill VSE, render) in 3371e5d, b3c620b, and a bunch of commits on the Worker

Feel free to poke me on #flamenco on Blender Chat ;-)

@Sybren A. Stüvel (sybren) : still have to make myself familiar with flamenco [I will have to do this for an upcoming studio job...].
beauty of the rule-based thingie was [iirc], that you could add something easily without having to touch existing code.
So in the case of netrender I added something like "Priority-frames" [frames to be rendered first] without too much hassle. (I think the rules could even be mixed per job, but I would need to have a look again, this was ages ago...)

It's now implemented as a sub-quadratic curve (power of 1.6666) with an artist-given maximum number of samples per task. As an example, 400 total samples with a maximum of 100 per task gives these render tasks (first number is "rendering and merging up to this sample count", and second number is samples in only that task):

@Philipp Oeser (lichtwerk) thanks for thinking along with us :)

Output to JPEG would also be good enough (w.r.t. PNG).

not sure if this is still relevant: netrender had something like this based on rules, see https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/BA/browse/master/netrender/balancing.py

I tried again with double-clicking Flamenco Manager, and here it really doesn't crash. I'm archiving this now, because I can't reproduce the issue and thus can't find the root cause. If you have more information that can help, please comment here.

This is in the master branch now.

Implemented & deployed to production.

Also only use mapped network drives (so S:/ instead of rackstation/software), as means something else to Blender. That, and of course T60131 should be fixed.

I recommend not using any exclamation marks in your path. Also only use mapped network drives (so S:/ instead of //rackstation/software), as // means something else to Blender. That, and of course T60131 should be fixed.

Please make sure that you have the latest Blender Cloud add-on 1.11.0 (just released) as it contains Windows and Blender 2.8 fixes. If you still see issues, please provide us with a proper bug report.