Real-Life Decision Making
You are a render wrangler who is rendering the frames for an upcoming motion picture. It is your turn to work the night shift. You're responsible for managing the 150 processors that are rendering the animations.
By the end of your shift, you're hoping to have the last of the rendering completed. So far, everything has gone according to plan and the production schedule is on time. Your shift has gone by without any problems. You're making great progress. In fact, you may even be done slightly ahead of schedule.
But at about 3 a.m., things start to go wrong. For some reason, some of the frames aren't rendering properly. Ten frames out of the last 200 haven't been rendered because the computer system keeps kicking them out. So much for an uneventful night, you tell yourself. And so much for finishing ahead of schedule.
Because you're the only one on, and there isn't anybody else to ask, you have no choice but to figure out what the problem is and what you're going to do to fix it. It's important you determine the problem right away, as you don't want to be the one responsible for slowing down the production process.
There are quite a few frames that the computer system kicked out. After looking at the clock, you wonder if you should just re-render the frames. Sometimes when you re-render, the error corrects itself. This is often the case if one of the processors isn't working properly.
However, if the problem was due to a script error, the error needs to be fixed before the job can be completed. In some cases, you might be able to fix the script error. But sometimes the error originates at the animation stage, so the frames must be returned to the animators for them to fix.
If the script error was made by one of the animators, you won't be able to finish the rendering tonight anyway. But if it's a problem with the machine, you can reboot it and then re-render the frames, and maybe even keep the production schedule on time.
However, if neither of these are the case, you're still going to have to determine what the problem is and how to fix it, which will really put you behind schedule.
What do you do?