Rendering — Natron 2.5.0 documentation

# Rendering

To start rendering in Natron you need to use the `render(effect,firstFrame,lastFrame,frameStep)` or `render(tasks)` functions of the App class. The parameters passed are:

- The writeNode: This should point to the node you want to start rendering with

- The firstFrame: This is the first frame to render in the sequence

- The lastFrame: This is the last frame to render in the sequence

- The frameStep: This is the number of frames the timeline should step before rendering a new frame, e.g. To render frames 1,3,5,7,9, you can use a frameStep of 2

Natron always renders from the firstFrame to the lastFrame. Generally Natron uses multiple threads to render concurrently several frames, you can control this behaviour with the parameters in the settings.

Let’s imagine there’s a node called Write1 in your project and that you want to render frames 20 to 50 included, you would call it the following way:

    app.render(app.Write1,20,50)

Note

Note that when the render is launched from a GuiApp, it is not blocking, i.e: this function will return immediately even though the render is not finished.

On the other hand, if called from a background application, this call will be blocking and return once the render is finished.

If you need to have a blocking render whilst using Natron Gui, you can use the `renderBlocking()` function but bear in mind that it will freeze the user interface until the render is finished.

This function can take an optional frameStep parameter:

    #This will render frames 1,4,7,10,13,16,19
    app.render(app.Write1, 1,20, 3)

You can use the after render callback to call code to be run once the render is finished.

For convenience, the App class also have a `render(tasks)` function taking a sequence of tuples (Effect,int,int) ( or (Effect,int,int,int) to specify a frameStep).

Let’s imagine we were to render 2 write nodes concurrently, we could do the following call:

    app.render([ (app.Write1,1,10),
                 (app.WriteFFmpeg1,1,50,2) ])

Note

The same restrictions apply to this variant of the render function: it is blocking in background mode and not blocking in GUI mode.

When executing multiple renders with the same call, each render is called concurrently from the others.

## Using the DiskCache node

All the above can be applied to the DiskCache node to pre-render a sequence. Just pass the DiskCache node instead of the Write node to the render function.