BackBurner renders fail after 60 minutes - Part 2

I thought of revisiting the BackBurner timeout situation after a few customers mentioned that the need to manually enter the timeout was slightly annoying. 

Since any permanent changes would need to be done by our development team. I thought It would be best to share a more permanent approach to get the timeout set.

Now setting this does involve editing the performExportToBackburner.mel file which support team does not generally recommend but editing these file.  Please make a local backup of the file before editing it.  

We can simply add  an extra line of code to force the timeout to be a new permanent value. Since we are editing this at the file level you will no longer need to populate the command manually when submitting the job.

So, this is what has to be done.

1. Go to: C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya 2012\scripts\others
2. locate the file called performExportToBackburner.mel and make a backup of this file.
3. Now open the original file in word pad and locate the the following line.

"// Prepare the list of tasks and send it to Backburner through a task list file"

4. A few lines below that I add a new line.  The new line is in bold below.

// Prepare the list of tasks and send it to Backburner through a task list file
int $startFrame = `intFieldGrp -q -v1 bbExportStartFrameCtl`;
int $endFrame = `intFieldGrp -q -v1 bbExportEndFrameCtl`;
int $taskSize = `intFieldGrp -q -v1 bbExportTaskSizeCtl`;
if( $taskSize < 1) $taskSize = 1;
string $taskListFileName = createTaskListFile($jobName, $startFrame, $endFrame, $taskSize);
if($taskListFileName != "")
{
$exportSysCmd = $exportSysCmd + " -timeout 360 ";
}

5. Save the file.  Launch Maya and submit job and the new task timeout will be set to 360 minutes by default for every job.

Hope this helps the folks out there struggling with the timeout in BackBurner.