STMPO for After Effects (AWS Deadline Cloud)

Single-Task Multi-Process Orchestrator (STMPO) for Adobe After Effects running on AWS Deadline Cloud.

This repo extends the official AWS Deadline Cloud for After Effects integration with:

• A custom ScriptUI submitter (DeadlineCloudSubmitter_STMPO.jsx)
• A STMPO-enabled job template bundle
• A small collection of worker-side helper scripts

Together, they let a single Deadline task fan out into multiple parallel aerender.exe processes on a large multi-core worker, with optional NUMA-aware CPU affinity and automatic font deployment.

One Deadline task → many local aerender workers, with optional core pinning and AE Multi-Frame Rendering awareness.

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Features

• 🧠 STMPO orchestration

  • Splits a task’s frame range into N sub-ranges.
  • Spawns N child aerender.exe processes in parallel on the worker.
  • Tracks children, aggregates logs, and enforces a configurable fail-fast policy.

• 🧵 Multi-Frame Rendering–aware

  • Uses AE’s -mfr flag per child.
  • Supports explicit on/off for MFR.
  • Auto-mode can choose a concurrency based on logical cores and MFR settings.

• ⚙️ NUMA / CPU affinity (optional)

  • Reads a JSON NUMA map (numa_map.json) to understand physical CPU layout.
  • Slices CPU pools into affinity blocks and pins each aerender child to its own block.
  • Graceful fallback: if affinity or topology fails, STMPO logs a warning and continues without pinning.
  • Affinity is disabled by default (opt-in with --enable_affinity) and remains off by default on Windows hosts with more than 64 logical CPUs to avoid processor-group pinning errors (WinError 87).

• 🗂 Job template integration

  • OpenJD job templates for both video and image sequence renders.
  • STMPO controls exposed in the AWS Deadline Cloud submission UI.
  • Job environment that creates output directories on the worker before rendering.

• 🔤 Font deployment

  • Detects fonts used on the submitter machine, attaches them to the job, and installs them on the worker at job start.
  • Cleans up fonts at job end, so workers stay tidy.

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Repository layout

From the repo root:

.
├─ DeadlineCloudSubmitter_STMPO.jsx
└─ DeadlineCloudSubmitter_Assets/
   └─ JobTemplate/
      ├─ template.json
      ├─ image_template.json
      ├─ video_template.json
      ├─ job_environments_fragment.json
      ├─ parameter_definitions_image_fragment.json
      ├─ parameter_definitions_video_fragment.json
      ├─ step_image_fragment.json
      ├─ step_video_fragment.json
      └─ scripts/
         ├─ call_aerender.py
         ├─ create_output_directory.py
         ├─ font_manager.py
         ├─ get_user_fonts.py
         ├─ numa_map.json
         └─ stmpo_wrapper.py