Prime Focus Meets 4.0 'Deadline'

The R&D and software development arm of Prime Focus - Prime Focus Software - has announced the release of Deadline 4.0, the company's administration and rendering toolkit for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX-based render farms.
This new version includes improved Mac OSX support, enhanced scalability and stability, in addition to an abundance of key new features.
Mike Owen, Senior Technical Director, Burrows Nvisage said: "Even during the early stages of the beta program, it was obvious Deadline 4.0 was going to be an extremely feature-rich release.
"The new slave throttling and network load reduction features are brilliant at handling larger data files and keep Deadline highly responsive to users at all times.
"The development of Deadline continues to remain highly inventive with lots of new functionality whilst remaining stable and reliable under fire in production.
"Most notable in this release is the number of subtle enhancements that have been made, to not just the main applications, but also all the underlying software-specific scripts," continued Owen.
"Multi-threaded remote command execution and status feedback is fantastic for keeping control and ensuring consistency of our software load and configuration on all our slaves, and the new Pulse web service opens up a world of new possibilities for communicating information to other systems in our pipeline."
New Features in Deadline 4.0 include improved Mac OSX support: ffmpeg, Fusion 6, Generation, Maxwell 2, Maxwell for Maya, Maya 2010, MetaFuze, Modo 401, POV-Ray, Softimage 2010, Toxik 2010, Vue 8 and Nuke 6 enhanced scalability and stability, customisable themes for the user interface and compatibility with Prime Focus Software’s upcoming Deadline iPhone application.
(BMcC/GK)