Can I shut off the auto-rendering in the compositor?

It drives me insane when I’m on my laptop and every time I do ANY thing in the compositor, it re-renders, even if there is nothing new going on. Like, I’ll add a node, but not even plug it into anything, and it’ll automatically start rendering again, and ta-da, same exact scene, because I’ve done nothing that would justify a re-render. It makes it incredibly hard to do anything in the compositor when using an under-performing computer. And before someone says to uncheck the auto-render at the bottom of the screen, it’s not even on. I’d had to see what it does with it checked, seeing as how it’s already auto-rendering the crap out of things. Thanks for any tips.

Yeah, makes me crazy, too. The only thing (i found) that helps, is turning on/off the -use nodes- checkbox. You will see no update, but you can plug in some nodes or change things without waiting. Hope this will change in the future or somebody could please tell me where the magic button is :-).

It updates whatever is visible. You can stop the main render from updating completely by not having the Render Result up anywhere and collapsing the Composite node. Other nodes with previews might try to update too if those nodes are expanded. And of course, if the backdrop is enabled that will always update on the fly too. If you turn off backdrop and collapse everything with a preview, the auto-update is a fraction of a second here.

I don’t think there’s currently an option to ignore updating of visible outputs.

Makes sense. In Digi Fusion i always disable the thumbnailview, in Nuke there are only the inputs with thumbs. Would be nice to collaspe only the previews in all nodes (or to get rid of it) but leave the other parameters open. Til today i havent got a clue for what the composite node is necessary…guess it has something to do with the sequencer.

I should not complain, there is a hide preview button in the N-panel :slight_smile:

It does the actual act of feeding your composite to the main render buffer. It’s the primary endpoint on your node tree, although you technically don’t need it, you can use file-output node instead to dump straight to disk.