Fractal Architect 4 Help Index

Movie Render State


Applies to:FA 4

See also: Direct Video Render Window

Pausing/Resuming a Render

Because rendering a video can take so long, Fractal Architect 4 lets you Pause a movie render, save the render state as a document file, then Resume the movie render at a later time (after reopening the render state document).

Concepts

Movie render state holds the entire rendering state for a movie render.

When you open the Video Rendering Panel, a new movie render state document is created. If you close the Panel without starting a render, that document is discarded.

The document contains a snapshot of the fractal file and the specific animation to be rendered. This allows you to make changes to the original fractal file after starting a movie render. The Movie render state file is Not updated when any subsequent changes to the original. Also, changes made to the original fractal file do not affect any movie renders you started, paused and saved - before the changes were made.

When rendering you can Pause the render, save the Movie Render state, and close the app. Later, simply reopen the Movie Render state document to resume the render.

Movie Render State File

The movie render state file appears in the Finder as a thumbnail fractal with a rendering progress bar. It has a file extension of .mvrs. The Quicklook preview of the file shows the rendered video.

How Video Pause/Resume Rendering Works

In case you wonder how it works.

Case 1: Direct to Video

Note: Direct to Video rendering is not recommended for long videos. Use Render Frames to Image File Sequence option instead.

If anything goes wrong rendering straight to video, you will lose all the rendering effort expended. Rendering to an Image File Sequence is much safer.

Example: Rendering straight to My Video.mov

This example assumes you have chosen this render option:

Create New Video - Don’t Save Image Sequence

  1. Start rendering to My Video.mov.

    It starts rendering the video in main memory.

  2. Click Pause Render and Save render state

    On Pause, the current video is saved to My Video_Progress.mov.

    Movie render state is saved to My Video.mvrs. The render state document is not auto-saved, you must explicitly save it.

  3. Close app.

  4. Reopen the app at a later date.

  5. Open the My Video.mvrs - the movie render state document.

  6. Click Resume Render

    The video rendering is resumed.

    If you paused again, the video content already saved to My Video_Progress.mov, will be spliced ahead of the video frames produced now.

    If video render finishes normally, the output video will be left in My Video.mov.

Case 2: Rendering to Image File Sequence (Video Created Later)

An Image File Sequence is a folder, where each video frame is saved as an image file.

The advantage of saving video frames as image files, is that it is easy to recover from a problem. The disadvantage is the large amount of disk space used to hold the images.

This example assumes you have chosen this render option:

Render Frames to Image File Sequence

Optionally, you can also choose And Make Video Afterwards

  1. Start rendering to My Video.mov.

    It starts rendering each video frame and saving them to the Image File Sequence.

  2. Click Pause Render and Save render state

    On Pause, movie render state is saved to My Video.mvrs. The render state document is not auto-saved, you must explicitly save it.

  3. Close app.

  4. Reopen the app at a later date.

  5. Open the My Video.mvrs - the movie render state document.

  6. Click Resume Render

    The video rendering is resumed.