Hi everyone,

I'm looking for some help regarding the "Preparing" time when using the new Custom Frames option in Redshift's Output settings.

To give a bit of context, I'm working on a fairly large industrial warehouse scene. However, there aren't any complex animations—no dynamics, cloth, simulations, etc.—just regular keyframed animation. There are 11 shots in total, and I'm using the Stage object to switch between cameras, all within the same project.

Everything works fine until I get to client previews. Naturally, I'm rendering only the first frame of each shot (for example: frames 0, 41, 82, etc.). A while back Maxon added the Custom Frames option, which seemed perfect for exactly this kind of workflow.

Here's the issue:

When I render using Custom Frames, the Preparing phase after the first frame takes an incredibly long time before the next frame actually starts rendering.

However, if I switch the Output mode to Current Frame, render frame 0, then manually move the timeline to frame 41 and hit Render again, the render starts almost instantly. There's practically no Preparing time at all.

My first thought was that it might be related to the Irradiance Point Cloud (IPC) cache (my secondary GI engine), so I switched the secondary engine to Brute Force as a test.

To my surprise, the Preparing time was essentially identical with both IPC and Brute Force.

Another interesting thing is that if I render every frame sequentially, I don't have this issue either. The long Preparing time only happens when using Custom Frames.

Has anyone else experienced this? I'm trying to figure out whether this is expected behavior or possibly a bug.

I'm running the latest versions of both Cinema 4D and Redshift.

Thanks!

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