Render with mutliple camera views

Blender 2.64

Can I setup 3 cameras and render 3 video clips at the same time? I would like to then place those 3 clips in my video editor and cut back and forth from the 3 different camera angles.

If you wish to simply change camera during animation, without jumping back & forth in time, bind the cameras to markers in the timeline:

  1. select camera
  2. in Timeline add Marker (M)
  3. with marker selected, bind camera to marker (Ctrl+B in Timeline)

repeat with other cameras

If you want to do more editing (e.g. jumping back & forth in time), use the sequence editor:

  1. place all desired cameras
  2. in VSE add a Scene strip
  3. in VSE properties select the camera under Camera Override

repeat with other cameras. Make sure ‘Sequencer’ box is checked (above Camera Override)

The simple answer is: No.

Rendering is a very heavy process for the CPU/GPU. Blender is having a hard time gathering all its stuff in one heap for one camera… It may start to get confused if you ask it to do several heaps with stuff belonging to all the heaps. Besides, you must expect some smoke coming out of your computer if you try to overclock it at twice or 3 times its factory speed. :wink: The best you can hope for (if the devs would ever consider the idea of multiple simultaneous renderings) is some slo-mo rendering. 2 cameras, half the speed… 3 cameras, 1/3 of the speed… And so on.

In other words, if you can’t make up your mind and switch of camera during the rendering, you’ll have to render everything all over again for each camera.

@Kaluura: The answer is actually yes!

That is what scenes are for. You can cross link all your geometry into three separate scenes so they have the same objects. Then create a different camera move in each scene. Then create another “master” scene that reads the result from the render layers of the three camera move scenes and sends them to their own fileoutput node. Click on Animation and Blender will render all three scenes to their own output files. These output files can then be imported into external editor or the VSE if that is what you are using.

I’m learning every day… Still, I wouldn’t recommend this route. It’s a bit tortuous IMHO. To simply activate the right camera, render and go to the next camera is more straightforward. At least, I’d know that everything is always rendered at full speed in front of my eyes. As long as you don’t forget to change the path in between the renderings, it’s safe and simple.

It’s a bit tortuous
Agreed! But if you just need to setup an unattended render for all scenes it is possible to do in Blender.

I like the markers method…the linked scenes sounds a lot more complicated…will have to try each to see the benefits.

Also, you can start multiple instances of Blender, and output to different folders. I just tried it with Cycles CPU rendering…
With one instance a scene took about 10sec to render…with 2 instances running simultaneously, about 18sec for the same scene.

Using the GPU instead for multiple instances may cause it to overheat (just guessing).

Just another workaround.

Will also check out Aaron Symon’s excellent addon. Thanks for the link. :smiley:

I thought so to at first… but make sure to set each camera save directory and it works fine in official 2.64a, it also worked fine in r51570 and r52037 from graphical.org that i’ve tried it on both with Internal and Cycles.