'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.

I wasn't thinking about encoding those as actual Tasks, but more as an extra payload in the same way we now also handle task cancellation requests. It would be just a list of job+task IDs to upload to the server. I'll have to think about it more to come up with a nice design that both works rapidly enough (when there are no workers asking for tasks, the Manager only infrequently polls that endpoint) and also doesn't load the server too much.

So this would be a parallel queue of "tasks" that are accessible from the "dpsgraph/dispatch" endpoint.
The main difference is that they would be performed directly by the manager?
Could this system be also used for uploading render previews to the server, or should that be part of the job definition?

We can have the Manager upload it to the Server on demand, for example by piggy-backing the 'depsgraph' endpoint the Manager uses to pull any changed tasks from the Server.