Playing video while rendering

I was just thinking, do any of the more expensive graphics tools let you scrub through your animation while you’re rendering it? It might consume some computer power to do while rendering was going on, but if you have it it would be handy to tell if something looks like it’s working so far.

The best way to ‘scrub’ through a animation render in progress is to render as separate frames, so that you can check your frames.

When creating an animation it is smartest to render to PNG sequence first anyway. That takes away the need to rerender the entire animation when you need to touch up only one or several frames. It isn’t hard to create a playable video file from those.

Making test renders on various ticks indeed is a good idea to prevent render flaws.
Another aspect is the timing of the animation. It’s often not so easy to evaluate in Bongo’s Preview.
I mostly make a test movie in Wireframe of Ghosted Display (hardly taking any time) before starting up a full rendered version.

Yeah I do all that. Pre-vis doesn’t catch everything though.

Just saying that it follows from flipping through the frames in Explorer, as they’re rendering it would be nice to do that right in the render window.

I see. I added https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/BO-2913 to the system.

Note that flipping through high resolution images won’t necessarilly be fast.

For now you’ll have to stick to explorer, or maybe you could use another software to do the preview.

Guys -

Here’s what I do -

  1. I render to individual frames as mentioned.
  2. WHILE the BONGO render-run is running, I THEN open a session of IRFANVIEW ( a low-cost pic viewer) I paid the license to use at work for(~$25?) …
    Since my check-run frames drop out pretty FAST, I can drop over to the file folder, select “Filename-000.png” (depending on YOUR file pic format …), and let it rest there a moment while I set the slideshow frame time to something like .2 second. Your rate CAN equal a portion of a second equal to your frames-per-second rate ( I use either 15fps or 30fps depending on the target need …)
    I THEN close this IRFANVIEW session, and
  3. open a new IRFANVIEW session. Settings hold. I THEN click on the same “Filename-000.png”, and set the slideshow in motion.

That’s all there is to it !
NOTHING is “compiled”, it just plays the frames. It’ll stop at the last frame created when you opened the session, and if your BONGO render-run is still going it won’t pick THEM up , but THAT’s as easy as “X”-ing out and restarting a new session for further frames having been “rendered” up to THAT point, and so on …

I’m confident you can use any pic viewer that will let you run a slide show and set the per-frame time to parts of a second per frame, but this is what I do !

This gives me an EXCELLENT quick preview. It doesn’t let me “scrub” back and forth, but I’ve found this really useful for quick-checking my animations for materials, lighting, timing, etc. Of course PRECISE fixes can be seen once the render-run is complete, usually in an hour or so, but THIS is a HUGE HELP in MY process !

Good LUCK and -

All the BEST from Texas ! -

Chuck !