Monitoring And Controlling Your Deadline Job

Once you have submitted your job to Deadline, you can use the Deadline Monitor to monitor and control your job. You can open the Monitor from the Start menu, or by right-clicking on the Deadline Launcher icon in your system try and selecting Launch Monitor. If this is the first time you launched the Monitor on your machine, you will be prompted with a Login dialog. Simply choose your user name or create a new one before continuing.

Finding And Monitoring Your Jobs

The easiest way to find your most recent jobs is to enable Ego-Centric Sorting from the View menu. This keeps all of your jobs at the top of the job list, regardless of which column the job list is sorted on. Then sort on the Submit Date/Time column to show your jobs in the order they were submitted. If the current user isn't you, you can login as another user by selecting File -> Change User.

To update the progress of your job, simply click on it in the job list. If you want to update everything in the Monitor, simply click the Refresh button in the main toolbar, or press F5. You can see the state that each of the job's tasks are in by looking in the task list.

Controlling Your Jobs

If at some point you need to pause the job for whatever reason (perhaps to change some job properties), you can do so by right-clicking on the job and selecting Suspend Job. When you are ready to let the job continue, simply right-click on the job again and select Resume Job.

If you would like to modify the properties your job, you can do so by right-clicking on the job and selecting Modify Properties. Here you can change scheduling options such as priority and pool, as well as other general properties like the job name. If you wish to limit which render nodes your job runs on, as well as the number of nodes that can render it concurrently, you can do so under the Machine Limit tab. Depending on the application you're rendering with, you may see an extra tab (with the name of the plug-in) that allows you to modify properties which are specific to that application. More information on job properties can be found in the Job List Documentation.

If your job starts producing errors, you'll notice that your job will change from green to brown, then eventually to red (depending on the number of errors). To view the errors for the job, you can right-click on the job and select Job Reports -> View Error Reports. Often, the error reports will clearly show what the cause of the error is, allowing you can take the appropriate steps to resolve the problem.

When your job is complete, you can view the output images by right-clicking on the individual tasks in the task list and selecting the output filename. This will open the image in the application that is set to open that type of file by default. Note that this option isn't always available for some applications. In most cases though, you can view the output image folder by right-clicking on the job and selecting Explore Output. You can also view the logs for the job by right-clicking on it and selecting Job Reports -> View Log Reports.

Finally, once you are happy with the results and no longer need the job, you can delete it by right-clicking on the job and selecting Delete Job.