File access
Make sure all data relating to a project - the project directory itself, footage and render location - is located on a shared network drive that is both readable and writable to the render node machine.
The rule of thumb for file access is that a filename on the machine submitting the batch job must also be valid on the machine processing the batch job. Achieving this requirement involves care in where projects and footage are stored and how file servers are configured and mounted.
A complication arises in mixed operating systems environments due to the different way filenames are represented. For example, if a batch job is submitted from an OSX machine with the project located on:
/Volumes/server/path/to/project
then this will need to be converted into, say:
/mnt/server/path/to/project
on a Linux machine, or
Z:/path/to/projects
on a Windows machine processing the job in order for it to be a valid filename. This can be achieved by specifying a File translation using the PFCleanNodeConfig program on the machine processing the job:
File translations are defined in pairs Global name and Local name. Any number of file translations can be defined in the list. If the batch job encounters any filename starting with the Global name part then it is, internally within the job, replaced by the Local name part. Taking the above screen-shot as an example, any filename in the project starting with /Volumes/server
will be
replaced with /mnt/server
thus making it a valid filename on the Linux machine. Note that UNC filename are not supported.
Since the mount point of a network drive could vary on different machines, the file translations need to be specified separately for each machine involved in batch processing.