Composite Then Render

Why we Comp *before* we render

Most rendering pipelines in other software splits lighting and compositing with rendering. Lighters place light, spit out renderlayers and passes, this gets sent to the farm by some TDs , we get image sequences out. compositors work with those and rarely see 3D. Why do it different?

Benefits of compositing after rendering (their way)

1- No waiting for renders before you comp. They are done! just comp. 2- because of 1, scrubbing is pretty much free. 3- lighting errors can be spot fixed by rerendering only mistake frames or passes.

Benefits of rendering after lighting (our way)

This is pretty much possible because of the integration of the rendering and compositing pipeline in Blender. We lose pretty much all of the above benefits, but we gain some things:

1- We can make comp fixes in 3D really fast using the same camera and animation; this negates the need for paintfixes and manually or automatically tracked masks in most situations. 2- We more tightly tie compositing and lighting, so we can make back and forth decisions really fast. 3- Our team is all over the world, downloading EXR frames to comp is prohibitively slow for compositing. (we could use jpgs as temp however) 4- We can simplify and skip managing renderlayers 5- We don't have to over-breakdown renderlayers or have super rigid pipeline 6- Compositors have access to everything.

Final note: we can do both

If the need arises we can have both techniques, there is no reason to have just either or, it can be on a shot by shot basis.