When working in ConnectFX and the timeline, you can get instant feedback when viewing and playing back clips without the need to render. To output your clips, however, you do need to render. In many areas of Smoke, rendering is straightforward by using the Render box, or contextual rendering options. In most cases, rendering clips and sequences from the Workspace only renders the required effects and transitions (and not all effects and transitions located on multiple video tracks).
See the following sections for some tips on rendering in Smoke, and follow the links in the Related Information section for specific rendering-related topics.
Rendering media can be time-consuming, and depends on a number of factors, including the type of media and the effects applied to it. Static frame pipeline optimization can significantly decrease rendering times for sequences or ConnectFX schematics that use static source generators (such as the Coloured Frame Node, for example), static media (stills), and static effects. A static effect is one that is not animated over time, such as static Text or a static GMask. When rendering static media, the result of a static source generator or a static effect, Smoke renders and caches a single static frame, and uses that frame for the duration of the static element, rather than rendering each individual frame. This enables noticeably shorter rendering times.
In order to increase performances when in interactive mode, the hardware anti-aliasing (HWAA) level in interactive mode gets automatically disabled whenever the graphics card doesn't have enough memory. This can happen in Text, GMask, and Action modules.
Whenever the graphics card has to swap some of the textures to disk in order to allocate memory for a large HWAA buffer, the responsiveness of the system is affected. To increase the reactivity of the interactive mode, Smoke disables the HWAA whenever this happens. The availability of HWAA in interactive mode depends two factors: the amount of graphics memory available when the HWAA level is set, and on the resolution of the monitor where the user interface is displayed.
In the Preferences menu, there are a few options to help you set default rendering settings. See and .