Animation - Skip frames when nothing changes?!

[SolidMind]

Hi all!
Been doing a lot of instructional animations for a client, and I have 2 big ones (+10minutes) coming up!

Needless to say there have to be pauses in an animation and I usually have 1 second pauses (25frames) that I add in 3dsmax after a camera movement etc, sometimes more sometimes less but around 1 second. I´ve been experimenting with few ways too tackle this.This last project was about 8000frames and what I did was to write down the framenumbers that has movement in them and send those to render.
Lets say I have 100frames too render and with 1 seconds paus in the middle, I send frame 0-50 and 76-100 to render, then I take frame 50 and copy it 25 times and with a 3rd party software I rename them to fill in the gap (frame 51-75). I do this to save both rendertime and keeping the cost down.
How would you guys do it? Do the 3dsmax scene without pauses and do the pauses in post? There are perhaps 50ish pauses in the coming animations.

I´m also thinking that, perhaps that would be a nice feature for Vray to have? To analyse the scene and in the frames where nothing happens, reuse the previous frame (like copy-paste) until the action starts again.

[Garryclarke]

Hi,

I sometimes have to do a similar thing with pauses etc. I just render then as separate sequences and do the pauses in post (I use aftereffects). I would only have a pause of 1 or 2 frames in my animation, not 25 or 50, so I don't have to worry about rendering more than 1 or 2 stationary frames.

[SolidMind]

Thanks for your input Garry! Perhaps it wouldn´t be too hard to write a script that outputs the frames where there is anykind of action going on or the opposite, where nothing happens.

[notamondayfan]

I would also say look into only rendering the frames where things are moving, then use something like After Effects to fill in the gaps.

Time Remapping would work, and not that difficult to master.