Save-to-now Render button
If rendering to AVI or ffmpeg and things crash - or more commonly, you notice something going wrong with the render and you stop it - you're left with an unrecoverable movie file, and you have to start over.
The common solution is to render out PNGs or EXR frames, and restart the render from the interrupt-point. This method also has the advantage of preserving alpha. But if you're doing long renders without alpha, movie files are a sensible choice... Until you notice an error.
Is it possible to have a soft-escape button that stops rendering movies, but re-writes the movie file metadata to wrap-up the movie as a whole file? That way we'd just need to find the frame where things go nuts, make changes, re-start the render from where the render goes crazy and just edit the clips in a common editing workflow?
4 Comments
While this might be a nice-to-have, it's a technically non-trivial problem to solve (else it would've been solved a long time ago in many other applications). This is why rendering to image sequences is common practice everywhere . Rendering from 3D straight to a movie file is almost never the sensible choice.
Maybe I'm wrong but it is completely due to how video encoding works under the hood. And Blender can't do anything about that, except maybe save the frames individually on the side... which takes more disk space, more processing time, more ressources...
@-L0Lock-: Disk space is cheap. An option to save as an image series and a video would be awesome for letting a low-effort (test?) render run while you're off to do something else.
Then perhaps a tick box that basically triggers a script that assembles the frames into a time-based movie format of your choice automatically. So, single frames are still rendered out, and there's a 'Compile frames to Movie' option or something. Disk space is cheap, processing time is orders of magnitude less than doing it manually, and the resources are already within the software - Blender already has the AVI and ffmpeg codecs.