Batch-rendering

Now that we have all our files preflighted and the render settings were all correct, we can set up something called batch rendering. A batch rendering is a way for CINEMA 4D to render several files without you having to come back and start each one individually. It's really important to be able to do that for efficiency's sake. You want to be able to start something at the end of the night and then walk away with confidence that when you come back in the morning it will be ready to go. And batch rendering is a way to accomplish this. Another way of rendering is using a render farm is a CINEMA 4D's way of distributing the render across multiple machines, and that's a very different from the batch rendering process.

In a batch render, the renders all happen on a single machine and that's what we're going to do here today. I'm going to go the Render menu and go to Batch Rendering and go to Job 1, and this is the first job we are going to do. So I'll just load up the shots one at a time in the correct order. So I'll start with shot-001-render_END and then I'll go to shot-002-A-render_END and then shot-002-B-render_END, shot-002-C-render_END, and then shot-003-render_END, and then for the Job 6 it'ds shot-004-logo-render_END and for Job 7, shot-004-shark-render_END.

Now, you'll notice that it cuts off the filename here. If you just click once and then drag to the right you'll see the file names. I like to this on each of the jobs so that I can make sure that I have all those render files in there, and I am not accidentally rendering something twice. So now I've got shot-001 render, shot- 002-A, shot-002-B, shot-002-C, shot-003, the logo and the shark all ready to go. So that's it. All we do is the hit the OK button, and if we have everything set up correctly when I hit OK the Picture Viewer will pop-up and it will start rendering the first shot. You can see now it's preparing, and there it goes on the first shot.

Now, usually I wait around for a few minutes before I walk away to make sure that everything is going correctly. And as long as I know more than a couple of frames have gotten off okay then you are free to go. So that's it for the batch rendering process. This is going to take quite a few hours to render depending on the speed of your machine, and try to work your day so that you set up renders and have them go overnight. That way you can go spend time with your family or relax for a while and then come back in the morning and collect all your renders and bust out the project.