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Can I render the first half of an animation on my computer and the second half on my friends the make them video files and combine them?

qaz
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  • then make the video files* – qaz Nov 14 '16 at 13:23
  • You can, just manually set them to render different frame ranges. Don't forget to never render directly into a video format. – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Nov 14 '16 at 13:57
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    Render as image sequence on each computer, then encode those frames as a video file. –  Nov 14 '16 at 14:35
  • Also look at this answer: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/15844/render-on-more-than-one-computer – Matt Nov 14 '16 at 14:49
  • @Duarte Farrajota Ramos why do I not directly render it to a video file? What else should I do? – qaz Nov 14 '16 at 15:35
  • If something goes wrong, if the computer crashes, or the file somehow becomes corrupt, or you need to change something midway, then you will end up with a huge corrupted useless video file that is unmanageable and unrecoverable. If you render to an image sequence you can salvage every frame saved to disk easily – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Nov 15 '16 at 00:23

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Render as image sequence on each computer, then encode those frames as a video file later.

open the project on both computers and just change the range of frames each computer should render.

Never render to video for two reasons:

If the computer crashes you will loose all, if you render as separate images you just loose the last rendered frame.

The second reason is that by having an image sequence you can then find the correct encoding settings without having to start from scratch.

Also, if you render on different computers as video then you have to re-encode to make the files a single video. Every time you encode you loose quality