AE Render Engine watch folder frequency change

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AE Render Engine watch folder frequency change
by Paul Roper on Apr 16, 2012 at 8:42:45 pm

Hello,

I have anywhere between one and three machines that I use for a render-smallholding, which sit there watching a folder every ten seconds waiting to render something. My IT/network guys have told me that every time AE sniffs at the watch folder, it causes some slowdown of the network (which results in dropped frames for other users running FCP7 - not that it take anything more than someone sneezing in the next town to make FCP drop frames!).

So...does anyone know of a way of making AE sniff at the watch folder LESS frequently? Maybe every 30 seconds instead of every 10 seconds? There's nothing in the preferences, but I wonder if there's some kinda config file that I can tweak?

Thanks in advance,

Paul

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Re: AE Render Engine watch folder frequency change
by Dan Fredley on Apr 18, 2012 at 7:15:52 am

Unfortunately, it's not accesible via AppleScript.

Here's a program and shell script that will help you:

3993_mouseclickinterval.zip

Copy the command-line application in the link above to your /usr/local/bin folder (it's hidden so use "Go to folder..." in Finder menu).

You'll need to type in your password to authenticate.

Start Watch Folder
Drag Watch Folder window up to the top left corner as far as it will go towards the Apple Menu
Drag the included shell script in the terminal
Hit Enter

I set the default to 60 seconds in the script.

You can adjust interval time in the script as well as the screen coordinate if it's a bit off.

Dan Fredley

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Re: AE Render Engine watch folder frequency change
by Dan Fredley on Apr 18, 2012 at 10:16:02 am

Actually, I realized that script would pause for 60 seconds then unpause for 60 seconds.

This new script is updated to where it will wait 15 seconds while Watch Folder checks for new files, then it will pause for 45 for example. But there will always be a 15 seconds delay while it is unpaused.

3994_mouseclickinterval.zip

Make sure it is NOT paused before starting the script. Otherwise it will do the opposite of what you want.

Anyways, hope it helps.

Dan Fredley

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Re: AE Render Engine watch folder frequency change
by Paul Roper on Apr 18, 2012 at 4:26:56 pm

Thank you for this! I haven't tried it yet but it seems like a great workaround which I hadn't thought of - I assume the idea is to simulate a click on the 'pause' button. I also have Keyboard Maestro installed which could do the same thing, hopefully slightly more reliably - it has a "click at x,y on the frontmost window" so in theory it shouldn't matter where on the screen the watch folder progress window is.

Presumably I need to take care that once a render has started, nothing important appears in the location where the watch folder progress window was, because the repeated clicking will still continue.

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Re: AE Render Engine watch folder frequency change
by Dan Fredley on Jun 12, 2012 at 5:22:23 am

I was just perusing the preferences file and under a section called: ["Misc Section"] there are a couple of preferences called:

"Watch Folder Wait Time" = "10"
"Watch Folder Wait Time (first wait)" = "5"

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Re: AE Render Engine watch folder frequency change
by Paul Roper on Jun 12, 2012 at 3:57:04 pm

Hi Dan,

That looked like exactly what I needed...so (after making a copy of the prefs file!) I went in and changed the "10" to "30" and then launched AE, but it didn't like it - it gave an error message, and automatically duplicated the prefs file and appended ".old" on the filename:

By the way, the error is nothing to do with that double closing quote mark (..."30"") - that's just a part of the error message.

Setting AE to watch folder mode revealed that it was back to its old 10-second routine. BUT, the server here has been updated so it's no longer a problem anyway! The issue was if I was rendering a long sequence of frames, all the AE render nodes would ask (after each frame rendered) which frames had been rendered, and it was taking the server a while to produce a list of the hundreds/thousands of frames that had been rendered. But that's been fixed now.

But it still seems very odd that editing a prefs file would cause AE to freak out - surely the point of a prefs file is to tell AE how to behave?!

- Paul

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Re: AE Render Engine watch folder frequency change
by Dan Fredley on Jun 15, 2012 at 10:04:23 pm

It worked fine for me. It looks like you have curly quotes around the 30 compared to the smart quotes around the "Watch Folder Wait Time". Make sure you open the prefs file in TextWrangler (which preserves all original values) and only change the 10, not the quote marks.

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