Advanced Pipeline Tools (APT)

Updated: 6 Mar 2025

Introduction #

The Advanced Pipeline Tools (APT) for NotchLC is a set of highly configurable command-line tools tailored for render farms and large productions. It is designed to work with scriptable render farm management tools such as AWS Thinkbox Deadline and has been developed to offer the best possible performance.

See our official announcement here.

Features #

NotchLC APT are capable of the following features:

• Process single images or image sequences in TIF, PNG, EXR, or JPG format, with support for 8 and 16-bit formats
• Encode to single or multiple-frame NotchLC QuickTime (MOV) output files, processing on the GPU
• Slice, crop & resize to multiple output files simultaneously without re-encoding - processing in parallel across the farm or cluster
• Concatenate multiple MOVs to a single file, also without re-encoding

Tools #

At present, there are two tools available:

• NotchLC Processor - Encodes an image or sequence of images to a NotchLC QuickTime MOV.
• NotchLC Concat - Concatenates a number of NotchLC QuickTime MOVs into a single QuickTime MOV without re-encoding.

Licensing #

Licenses are delivered as floating network licenses, with a Codemeter license USB dongle inserted into a License Server. (See requirements for more details) ‘Nodes’ do not require a physical dongle to be inserted.

Each ’node’ is automatically allocated a license from the license server for a 24 hour period at time of use. After this period, the license is automatically returned to the server.

Requirements #

NotchLC Processor & Concat Requirements #

• Windows 10 or later
• Modern, multi-core, x64 based processor
• For GPU encoding: A modern GPU supporting DX11 or later.

Note: For superior performance, the NotchLC encoder used in Processor, runs in GPU mode by default. This is a highly parallelised encoding process where performance directly correlates to the generalised CUDA cores & memory bandwidth of the GPU. Where a discrete GPU is not available Processor can be run in CPU only mode, but it is orders of magnitude slower than GPU mode.

License Server Requirements #

See: Network License Server Documentation

Download #

Contact us to request access and discuss implementation for your product pipeline.

Installation #

For installation of the License Server see: Network License Server Documentation

Prerequsites: Codemeter Runtime v8.20a or later must be installed before use.

1. Install the Codemeter Runtime, available here
2. Install the license that has been provided
3. Unzip the zip file that you were provided and run the executable you need

In most cases, network licenses will automatically be detected by the NotchLC Processor & Concat tools. If you have a more complex network setups refer to our Network License Documentation documentation.