I have an interesting problem, i hope you understand.
If you think about most films, they aren’t just one take, they are many, many, many, takes.
Is there any tool in blender so you can set it up to render different takes on its own as one animation? rather that have to put them together in other programs?
Oh i’m lazy so i want to render them once, and then they are, done? Rather than having to render them, then composite them?
PLEASE
You may be refering to Editing. This is the process of ‘cutting’ out the bad shots and leaving the good ones in the right order.
This can be done in Blender using the Sequencer tool. You swap over to the Sequencer tool (a timeline) then load (import) a clip, or piece of video media, and place it correctly on the timeline. Then trim it to the right length.
this weekend I just wrote about how to do that in my upcoming book, so stay tuned! But David is correct; see the wiki http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Sequencer
You can also set up linked or alternate scenes (same scene with different camera angle, full copy scenes with the same camera angle but alternate animation, entirely different scenes, or, any combination of the above) and have Blender render these scenes, independently, to disk AND make a composited scene of any combination or all of these separated scenes via the compositor or sequence editor as the sequence of scenes advances frame to frame.
These scenes can be viewed as “Takes” and if you want to change the scene later then you have all the extra rendered image sequences that weren’t used in the final composite. Rendering out like this will allow you to use any unused frasmes as B Roll.
Rendering all scenes to disk without compositing them into a scene, then opening a new scene to composite your pre rendered scenes into a final makes the most sense unless you have a very clear vision of what you’re after and an excellent sense of timing in which the B Roll will allow you to easily make changes if circumstances change at some point later in the game.
edit…
select scene sequences in the compositor via the little arrows on the lower left corner of any render layer node, then select the desired scene from the popup…giving meaningful names to scenes speeds this along. This process may seem a bit confusing at first but after watching the render order work through the indivual scenes a few times the light begins to become so bright and the advantages so clear that you’ll begin to wonder how you could have ever possibly worked in anyother manner due to the clumsy, inefficient, and limiting boundaries you were formerly shackeled to.
I often have many scenes in the composite (half or more) dedicated to single objects, while the other scenes containlogically ordered groups.
Initial setup requires and little forethought (sometimes backtracking to reconfigure due to mistakes or idea changes, etc) and it’s definitely more work but the payoff is that you gain exponentially more controll.
If you can imagine having to go back to bblending without composite nodes then you can understand my fealings on blending without scene compartmentalization.
Rambobaby that sound really cool, but puncuation lets you down a bit. Can you edit post with some line returns and comas? i found it hard to read.
Sometimes (often) this site does that to my posts…not sure why.
Personally, I render scenes (using the very rough “preview animation” button that’s found on the 3D window…) and cut them right away into an acceptable sequence using Final Cut. I used to use Blender’s tool for this, many moons ago, and it so happens that I shifted and haven’t shifted back.
I do think that, all in all, it helps me to approach “editing” much as you would do with traditional filmmaking… or rather, as a traditional film might view “previsualization,” because really that is what I am actually doing with this. I want to get “as close as I can, as quick as I can,” to something that I can think I might use… and I want to spend as little time&resources on it as possible because (hey, with all the dumb mistakes and choices I still make) quite a lot of my rough-cuts get discarded.
Now… in the traditional sense of the word “compositing,” I do a lot of that! Even though my hardware has finally gotten more powerful than it used to be, I still don’t like to render “a fixed background” more than once. And I still like to be able to “tweak.”