Blackmagic Forum

I asked it soooooooo many times. Probably not a hudge thing to do

This would be nice for long projects

up

Yes, its been asked for many times ... +1 again.

I would find it useful.

yes has been asked.

+1 for pause
+1 for export of the final ist in human readable file (TXT/XML I dont care)
+1 for import of "exporting lists"
+1 for reorder of priorities
+1 for keeping the exports list if i duplicate a project....
+1 for background rendering.

(and so on...)

waltervolpatto wrote:+1 for keeping the exports list if i duplicate a project....

Oh yes! This has been asked so many times.
+1 to all of this.

+1
Although I have some requests that to me are more important, a pause would definitely be a nice to have when working on large exports! Would have used it before if already present for sure.

Lucius Snow wrote:Probably not a hudge thing to do

As a developer I can tell you it might surprise you that things aren't always as easy as they seem. For instance these are some things developers perhaps should take into account when implementing just this pause;

- What to do when you change the scene while the export of it is in pause?
- How about when you're exporting to a compressed format, like mpeg, which uses i-frames? Will they be stored? Will it be handled by some external library and is that library capable of pausing an export in progress where compression needs to know previous and coming frames? Is NVIDEA hardware capable of doing this? Is it capable of changing frames if you changed something while in pause?
- Should the whole UI freeze to make it impossible to change something while in pause mode?
This might even look like a simple question, but there are situations where this is not such a simple question and can lead to advance usage. Like mutiple usage of the same clip, but with different settings or fusion nodes and/or within other parent timelines. When the UI would just freeze at pausing we would miss a lot of pretty useful ways to edit things while being paused...
This might not interest you perhaps, but other people might. And they could complain when the full UI freezes at a pause to prevent changing timelines etc.

These are just some things that came up, I bet there are more things to take care and think about.

I'm not working for Blackmagic, so can't tell what they have to think of or do at all, but I can say it doesn't seem like 'not a huge thing to do' for me per se. Bottom line: it's a single line to ask, but rarely a single answer to give. (BTW I often make the same mistake)

Submitted jobs should be ”snapshots”, so changes after starting the render would not make a difference. Interframe encoding could be a tougher nut but afaik it is up to hardware and driver to handle the states of encoder, as long as the encoder instance handles are kept, pausing the frame submitting should not have any side effects and can be continued later.

Hendrik Proosa wrote:Submitted jobs should be ”snapshots”

Still that's only one opinion. Also the assumption that Davinci even creates a 'snapshot' I highly doubt is true at the moment, meaning that 'simple' pause should then cause DaVinci to need a complete rebuild of the parts of the core basically to implement such a 'state system'. I would think the only state that's there is what you're currently working on (besides data in undo levels).

And even if you have a state system and can use a state for export while working in another state (obviously making things way more complex internally), still you can't capture everything in such a state. For the simple reason Davinci doesn't control the OS. So what if your asset files are changed? How and when should the exporter act when it finds out (if it can)? These are all things that needs a lot of decision making after weighting pros and cons of use cases and can take a lot of this time for developers to include this 'simple' pause.

Just being the devils advocate here, because some people way too easily think that some things are 'easy' to implement while in reality they might not be and might even be very hard or change a lot of things that all need testing again after and make things prone to (new) errors. It's best IMO to just add a feature request without any opinion on how hard is will be to implement if it's not your software. But again, I'm making the same mistake on other companies software too so I understand that trap

All these issues are solved in other softwares which can pause. Snapshot is a database level ”thing”, it is a temporary save if you will. Problem is rather that Resolve most probably does not have a way to run multiple instances of itself in parallel. If assets are changed it is the exact same situation as now: what if assets get randomly changed before or during render? Render gets messed up, that’s what happens, because Resolve does not create a shadow copy of each and every media file it needs. And yet everyone is able to live with this.

Hendrik Proosa wrote:All these issues are solved in other softwares which can pause. Snapshot is a database level ”thing”, it is a temporary save if you will. Problem is rather that Resolve most probably does not have a way to run multiple instances of itself in parallel. If assets are changed it is the exact same situation as now: what if assets get randomly changed before or during render? Render gets messed up, that’s what happens, because Resolve does not create a shadow copy of each and every media file it needs. And yet everyone is able to live with this.

Kind of, but as mentioned other software can pause and restart and that is the feature that also guarantee background rendering: you need power? We pause, you release power? We redstart the render….

As a guy without a decent power supply, watching by battery dwindle... yeah, seems handy.

+1

+1

+1

Yeah, that would be a fantastic feature. I think one of the tricks would be how to deal with something like an H.264 render with an interframe codec, and when the compression spreads across to multiple frames, it'd be hard to just pause and then figure out where it has to pick up. If it could just start with an I-frame, then it could potentially work.

I know a bunch of facilitates that just render DPX or EXR for the simple reason that they can always bail out of a render, then pic up with the frame on which they stopped and keep going from there. But harder to do with a single continuous file.

But I'd love to see a "pause render" feature happen.

+1