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I just finished rendering an animation for 20 hours, and i'm not sure about the compositing i did. Is there a way I can re-composite the animation and then export? (The current file is a .avi if it helps.)

Thanks!

Jack
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    You can do additional compositing or reverse some compositing with more compositing, but there is no way to get the data before compositing. The usual workflow would be to render out the animation to an .exr image sequence in which a variety of information of the renderlayer is stored. After rendering, the images should be used as input to the compositor. That way previewing is much faster during compositing. – Leander Jul 14 '18 at 20:42
  • That is why you never render directly to a video format, and that is why it is generally not advised to composite directly over the rendering result – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Jul 14 '18 at 21:01

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Never ever render directly to video... (and avoid AVI as a container much as you can). There is no way to break down the composited image into its original parts any more, and on top of that a video encoded and image will likely yield errors due to compression.

Use a low resolution/low quality video format just to evaluate the pacing of the animation, but do the final render as an image sequence. That will allow you to avoid situations like the one you are facing where you will have to re-render to make any changes.

If you want to do compositing later, save as image sequences to a format like OpenEXR, in which you can save not only the final rendered image but proper Alpha channel, Z depth information, object and material IDs and whatever other render layer information you want.

Then you can composite as you like and do a final video encoding later.

(read Save all render passes to a single EXR image)