The software is rendering a meaningful thumbnail when using the transcoding task thumbnail in a local render task. To render a meaningful thumbnail outside of the software e.g. on the render farm, you can use the CLI version of the software.
The flag render-element-proxies allows to render a transcoding mapping for an element.
You need to provide:
element uuidtemplate mapping name
Command line to trigger the proxy rendering via the CLI tool:
/path/to/das-element_1.2.5_lin render-element-proxies <element.uuid> "template mapping name" "C:/path/to/das-element_1.2.5_win.exe" render-element-proxies <element.uuid> "template mapping name"
The example Python script (create_thumbnail.py) from the GitHub page does not include this feature to detect a meaningful thumbnail frame. A lot of “magic“ is happending behind the scenes which would make the example script to complex and to harder to maintain.
Example setup
The main farm transcoding task will be send the main transcoding job to the farm. The proxy tasks (proxy, thumbnail, filmstrip) have noop (no operation) as the transcoding tasks. This is needed in order to save the correct file paths to the database for the proxies.
An extra job triggers the template mapping render proxies on farm via the CLI tool that renders the proxy files. This will execute a local render including the rendering of a meaningful thumbnail.
Example for the extra render job with Deadline
Exec
"C:/Program Files/Thinkbox/Deadline10/bin/deadlinecommand.exe"
Params
-SubmitCommandLineJob -executable "C:/mnt/server/path/to/das-element_1.2.5_win.exe" -arguments "render-element-proxies <element.uuid> \"render proxies\"" -name "[das element] <name> - proxy" -prop BatchName="[das element] <name>" -frames 1 -chunksize 1 -priority 50 -prop JobDependencies="<custom.dependency>" -prop OutputDirectory0=\"<paths.proxy.directory>\" -prop OutputFilename0=\"<paths.proxy.filename>\"