Animation rendering: show true per-frame rendering time, including between-frame overhead
When rendering animations, especially 2D motion graphics or anything else that has low per-frame times, the rendering stats don't show the true time to render each frame: they show the time spent in rendering, but none of the between-frame overhead: writing the image to disk, loading the next state, setting up the render, etc.
For long render times this may not be significant. For animations that render faster, this in-between time can be longer than the rendering time by a factor of 2 or 3 or more. As a result, the render stats are useless for predicting the length of a render.
E.g. a recent project of mine has .45 second rendering per frame, but the true time per frame is about 1.3 seconds.
I would prefer "Frame:123 | RenderTime:00:00.45 | PerFrameTime:00:01.30 | Mem..." etc.
3 Comments
Just a note: if you render from the CLI (i.e. without GUI) the true per-frame render time is one of the stats shown. It would be nice if this was shown in the GUI version as well.
This would be a little challenging to add at the moment because as far as I can tell the non-rendering time isn't actually timed anywhere. What might be possible would be providing two times: active render time and non-render time. Still, showing that time in advance would be difficult, but having a running tally as you work should be fairly easy to add. It's probably something I could extend my render time estimation add-on to support.
* @Jason van Gumster * Thanks Jason -- how about a very simple method of just noting the time stamp each time a render starts? Or finishes? Or whatever is simplest? Is that not a simple task? (I know sometimes the simple sounding things aren't. :-) )