Instead of reading this article, 
you may want to watch this 26min video:
(Recommended)


https://youtu.be/NnKJRT1fSmw



Layout


  • The Layout preset dialog was enhanced
    e.g. if you overwrite a layout, you can choose to update the changes for everyone who has applied this layout.

  • Font size +/- as layout option to override the global rrConfig setting.
    As different workstations might have completely different screen resolutions.

  • Shrink UI button (top right)
    If you need to watch over some jobs, but rrControl UI is too large.
    Just set some job filter to view the jobs of interest only.
    Then press the shrink button and move tot he corner of your second screen.
    Note that it has different settings for table column visibility.

  • New option in auto-update "Don’t load recent files".
    rrControl does not load and framebar, preview image or log file if it was change in the last 45 seconds.
    This is required if you are using a second office location with a synced fileserver that takes time to copy the files.




Filter


  • String filter box supports multi word search.
    Search Examples:   
           Shot30 beauty  -preview SceneFile=myScene.mb
           Notice the – in front of „preview“ to exclude these jobs.
           Notice the "SceneFile=" to force RR to find only jobs with scene files myScene.mb
           
           or Beauty ForeGround
           prepending "or" at the start of the filter changes the search mode to "OR" logic.
           Instead of searching for jobs that contain (Beauty AND ForeGround), it searches for jobs that contain (Beauty OR ForeGround).        

  • Quick search in user/project/render app dropdowns.
    e.g. open the user dropdown and enter the first name of the user.

  • Age filter offers more values

  • Menu to change filter checkboxes: all/invert/none

  • Filter for approved / not approved

  • "User" button switch between *all* and your user.





New Tabs


  • A dublicate of the „Job Log“ tab.
    View for example the Frames Table in the first one and the Render Log in the other one.

  • „Job Stats“ shows you many informations that RR has collected about a job and compare them between multiple selected jobs





Tab changes


"Job Log"



Sort mode

There is a new sort mode for the rrClient render logs at the bottom 

Client Stats

Some statistics for all clients that have rendered on the job.

Frame Table

RR 8 and RR 9 have these two information sources regarding frames rendered:

1) There is the Servers Job Log, sorted by time
    The rrServer saves a log with all informations like frames send, job crashes, job aborted.
2) Then there is the Clients Frame Log (Named in RR8: "Frames rendered")

    The client collects some information while he is rendering frames like CPU, GPU and memory usage.


The new "Frame Table" joins the information about frames from these two tables.

The table is sorted by frame (by default).


Example usage cases:

  • Right-click to open the render logfile of a specific frame.
  • Detect if a frame was started multiple times as you see two rows of the servers job log.

Job Performance

This page uses the information from the servers job log and mostly the information from the Clients Frame Log.
The Job Performance page has three parts:


1) A bar that shows you visually how often a job was send and how often these render crashed or aborted.


2) While a job is rendering, it shows you some stats about the cliens that are rendering.

  • Segment size (How many frames are send to a client)
  • CPU usage Min/Average/Max
  • Memory usage Min/Average/Max


3)
Notes:
This section has some bar graphs that show stats that have been collected 5 times during the render of a frame.

  • Segment size (number of frames send to a client at once) and their render time.
  • Frame Time
  • Highest CPU usage
    The Client collects the CPU usage 5 times during a frame. This section takes the highest peak during a frame.
    It can be that a frame has used 90% CPU for a few seconds and all of the other render time 1%.
    For this information we are interested in this 90% peak.
    It can show you the maximum number of cores that are supported by the renderer.

  • CPU time used for a frame
    This information is the average CPU usage for a frame.
    If the average CPU usage is very low, it might be caused by a long frame pre-processing time.
    Or it might be caused by a slow texture load or not enough memory to load all data at the same time.


  • GPU time used for a frame
  • Memory usage





"Job Info"

  • Collapse sections
  • Preview image size and arrangement slider


"Job Settings"

  • Filter by Name
  • Show changed settings only


"Global Info":

  • Client usage as pie chart or table.
    Interactive link between table and pie chart.




Job Table


  • If job you select a job that waits for other jobs, these other jobs are marked in light blue

  • Error icon contains number of errors

  • New approval columns "Cloud", "After preview", "Custom"

  • Hover over the (i) icon to see or click on (i) to change a User Comment

  • New command to reset specific frames of no-output jobs




Client Table


  • OS as icon

  • New Column: Installed Apps as icons

  • New Column: Client Efficency: Success/Aborted/Failed/Success Rate
    The Success Rate is the percentage of jobs that suceeded compares to failed+aborted jobs

  • New Column: TCP traffic In/Out

  • Right Click Option: “View Current Render Log”