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Render Overlapping Camera Markers

I work primarily on live-style-production projects with as many as 30 to 100 cameras in a short period of time; think live tv show with the majority of cameras fading in and out over one another. As far as I am aware, there is no simple method of rendering out an entire project with transitions in one click. I would like to be able to set 'in' and 'out' markers, not just simple 'switch to this camera on this frame' markers.

Say I have an animation that starts with camera 1 at frame 0, the active camera then changes to camera two at frame 144. Then camera 2 runs until an 'out' marker at frame 330, but camera 3 begins at an 'in' marker at frame 270--this creates an overlap area of 60 frames to be used for transitioning in post. Camera three has an 'out' marker at frame 495.

]------Camera 1------[]------Camera 2----]OVERLAP[----Camera 3------[

Pressing render for the entire range exports a rendered image sequence for each active camera range into a subfolder with the name of the active camera marker.

  • Camera 1/0000-0143.png
  • Camera 2/0144-0330.png
  • Camera 3/0270-0495.png

The user has the option to render in order of frame numbers (...Cam2/0268, Cam2/0269, Cam2/0270, Cam3/0270, Cam2/0271, Cam3/0271, etc...), or in order of active cameras, one at a time (Cam1/, Cam2/, Cam3/, etc...) Additionally, there is no limit to the number of cameras being rendered at a given frame.

The user can also check a box that automatically places each camera scene into the video sequencer at the appropraite start and end points either when finished rendering, or in realtime as each frame gets rendered. The user can pause the render (if rendering on the local machine) to playback what has rendered so far.

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Development Status: Open

Upvote 2 Downvote 1
scottiejhaines
17 Jan 2021

1 Comment

tintwotin

Currently, Blender VSE is limited to 32 channels. If you can work within this number of channels you can use scene strips in the vse for each camera, then use Multicam to for simple switching and then add crossfades: pasteall.org/media/0/c/0c093b0645e6e9e3c8c85f71b8c910d9.png