Batch Rendering
Harmony Server has the possibility to render your scene locally or send it to a render farm so other computers can render your scenes while you continue working on your station. This option is not available with Harmony Stand Alone.
There are two approaches to rendering a scene in Harmony Server:
- Local Rendering is done directly by your machine in your Harmony session. Hence, it uses your machine's resources and will prevent you from working on the scene until the render is done. You will see the render progress in real time and will be able to preview the results right after it's finished.
- Batch Rendering is done by sending a scene to the server's render queue so it can be processed by the render farm. This allows you to keep working on your scene while the render is being done. The rendering progress can be monitored in Control Center and, when finished, the results can be previewed in Play.
Batch rendering is a background process divided over several machines or a render farm. Sending your scene to batch render will share the rendering load with other machines in the render farm and lessen the amount of work required by your computer.
- Save all the contents of your scene, all drawings, colour palettes and the palette list.
- Select File > Save or press Ctrl + S (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ + S (Mac OS X).
- From the top menu, select File > Export > Export Images or press Ctrl + Shift + Y (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ + Shift + Y (Mac OS X).
If the system administrator did not complete the resolution configuration tasks, a warning message will open. This message notifies you that the resolution.conf file was not properly inserted in the configuration folder.
- Click OK to continue. You will still be able to render your scene.
The Export Images dialog box opens.
- In the File Type list, select the desired file type for the exported images.
- In the Colour Mode list, select an option to export your images: Colour, Colour with Transparency, or Greyscale.
- In the Colour Depth menu, select the number of bits per channel for the exported images. Most format only support 8 bits, but some support 16 bits.
- In the Range section, select the frames you want to render:
- All Frames: Sends all the frames in the scene to be rendered.
- Selected Frames: Sends the specified range of frames to be rendered.
- Select the Batch Composite option.
- Select the Chunk option if you want to split the render jobs into several smaller render jobs. This can be useful for example if you want your scene to be rendered by several machines in the render farm at the same time. Note that this only affects Frame renders. If the render includes a movie file, the movie will still be exported as a single file once all the frames have been rendered.
- Enter the number of frames for each chunk in the Size (Frames) field. For example, if your scene is 100 frames long and you enter a value of 20, there would be five entries in the queue of 20 frames each.
- Select from which camera the scene should be rendered. By default, scenes only have one Camera, but more can be added in the Node View, and each of them can be positioned and animated independently.
- Click OK to start the rendering process.
A confirmation dialog box opens to inform you that the frames have been sent to the Render queue.
If the selected frames were already sent to the Render queue, but were not yet rendered, dialog box opens to inform you that these frames were already in the queue, but that they have been updated with the latest rendering request.
You can also send scenes to batch rendering and check the status of the rendering queue from Control Center.