Software chosen to rebuild powerful data management solution

The leading render management software in the visual effects industry, Deadline is also used to manage compute resources in engineering and business markets. When Thinkbox began a complete overhaul of the software in 2012, they focused on enhancing performance and user experience across Windows, Linux and Mac OSX as well as establishing a solid foundation for the next generation of capabilities. With the support of Digia, Thinkbox’s developers were able to unify the Deadline code base whilst reducing development time and costs.
 
To facilitate the identical performance of Deadline across platforms, Thinkbox originally explored writing native interfaces on one platform and porting to others with open-source software. Instead, Thinkbox began testing the Qt development framework and redesigning the Deadline Monitor for improved performance and additional flexibility. Given the vast amount of data that is regularly processed through Deadline, Thinkbox first had to make sure that a Qt interface could remain responsive even with 100,000 jobs in the queue. By expanding the QTreeView control and developing a custom item model to populate the rows and columns of lists, Thinkbox was able to verify that the Deadline could easily scale up with a Qt interface.
 
Qt technology’s ease of use design meant that, without prior experience, Thinkbox developers produced a prototype of the main monitor application in under a month, thereby benefitting from increased testing time for the system as a whole. The shortened initial development phase with the Qt interface allowed the Thinkbox team to instead focus resources on developing new features, such as implementing a powerful data filtering system. Additionally, using Qt’s cross-platform toolkit freed up time that would have been otherwise spent writing code and standardized the development of Deadline moving forward.   
 
“Our existing Deadline code base contained a significant proportion of platform-specific code,” explained Justin Sawatzky, Deadline developer, Thinkbox Software. He went on to explain: “The Qt framework has opened this door for us, and will make it easier to provide powerful customisation capabilities.”
 
Following the immense success of Deadline 6.0 released in June 2013, Thinkbox recently launched version 6.1, a significant update featuring performance optimizations that enable facilities to scale like never before, and the company continues to grow its internal Deadline team. With the experience gained using Qt, Thinkbox is looking to extend cross-platform functionality to additional tools in various stages of development.