Render a blender animation in multiple threads using subprocess
Blender natively does multithreaded rendering on a single frame. This is not optimal for render a video. Each video frame is usually a single image and does not require much to render.
Break up the scene's start and end frames into sub-sections and run multiple instances of Blender simultaneously. This allows parallel rendering of frames.
First off, you will need to set Blender to output individual frames. I find
JPEG at 80% quality is a good setting. You need to set your output path to
contain the frame numbers as well, I use //frames/output_######.jpg.
When the addon is installed you will have a new panel in the render options. At the top you will have three choices:
You will then set a new output for the combined frames to be joined into.
You can change the settings that are used with FFmpeg if you need to customize the output. If you need to reset back to the default settings, right click the text box and select the reset option from the popup.
It would like help to go into the Performance panel in the rendering options and limit Blender to one thread before using Subprocess Render.
Remember to save before starting the subprocess render. The new Blender instances load the file from the drive, not the instance you have open.
You will need to install ffmpy with pip so blender can use FFMpeg. Blender is uses Python 3 for plugins so you will need to specify that when installing.
get-pip.py with the version of python blender is using. Likely
sudo python3 ./get-pip.pyffmpy. Likely sudo pip3 install ffmpy*Note: Only tested on Ubuntu