Movie Render Queue Overview

Provides a high level description and briefly describes how to use Movie Render Queue

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While Movie Render Queue is generally ready for you to use and provide feedback on, you may encounter issues when extending the system since the internal APIs are still in development. Additionally, not all Render Movie's functionality (such as Composure, GBuffer Channels, ProRes/AvidDNxHD, and XML export) is in Movie Render Queue at this time. We will continue to update and improve the functionality and stabilize the UI for Movie Render Queue before it is released from Beta.

Movie Render Queue is a successor to the Sequencer Render Movie feature, and is built for higher quality, easier integration into production pipelines, and user extensibility. With Movie Render Queue you can accumulate multiple render samples together to produce the final output frame, which allows for higher quality anti-aliasing, radial motion blur, and reduced noise in ray tracing.

Movie Render Queue also supports several other new features to produce high-quality renders, such as the new High Resolution setting that allows tiled renders to overcome GPU memory limits and device timeout limitations. You can also export translucent images (with appropriate project/scene settings), produce 16-bit HDR images with linear data, and save render configurations into assets that you can reuse and share between developers. Lastly, batches are now managed with the new render queue, which allows you to batch render multiple sequences easily, similarly to the rendering process in Adobe After Effects.

More specifically, this feature provides different benefits to different Unreal users over the existing Render Movie feature:

  • Gaming : You can produce higher-quality game trailers with less artifacts from motion blur and temporal anti-aliasing.

  • Automotive : Temporal super-sampling enables rotational motion blur for car wheels, and high-resolution tiling allows large output images.

  • Virtual Production : High-quality anti-aliasing and motion blur enable better looking output content.

  • Architectural Visualization : Spatial super-sampling allows nicely anti-aliased images with little ray tracing noise.

Example of 8K still-rendered image. Click to expand.

Eventually, Movie Render Queue will replace the existing Render Movie feature in Sequencer.

Enabling Movie Render Queue

To enable Movie Render Queue, open the Plugins window, locate the Movie Render Queue plugin, and enable it.

Enable both the Movie Render Pipeline and Movie Pipeline Mask Render Passes plugins. Click image to enlarge.

Restart the editor after enabling this plugin, and Movie Render Queue will be available for use.

Using Movie Render Queue

  1. Navigate to Window > Cinematics and select Movie Render Queue . A popup for the queue appears.

    navigation

  2. Select +Render to add sequences to the queue. You can also drag and drop sequences into the queue from the Content Browser.

    add sequence

  3. Select the link in the Settings column to adjust various options for the render. When complete, select Accept to confirm your selections. You can also save your settings as a Preset .

    settings column and links

  4. Select Render when you are finished. You can Render (Local) to use the render in your current session, or Render (Remote) to create a new render process on your machine.

Rendering Locally vs. Remotely

There are two Rendering options available, Local and Remote, and there is no quality difference in the final image between the two options.

Render (Local) renders in the same process as Unreal Engine and is similar to Play In Editor (PIE). This option is the primary render option and is useful for previewing your render as you are working, since you do not need to save your changes.

Render (Remote) launches an external process that renders all sequences in your queue. You must save your changes in the project so the external process can read the files from disk. The Render Remote option also allows you to implement a remote render farm while still preserving in-editor renders for quick previews while you adjust settings. The default behavior of the render options are determined by the Project Settings and can be adjusted to run your own code, such as adapting Render (Remote) to use third party render farm management software. Additionally, the command line used to launch the separate process is written to the Output Log, which can be a starting place for building your own automated render farms.

You can implement your own render farm by inheriting from <UMoviePipelineExecutorBase (MoviePipelineExecutor.h)> . You can see examples in <MoviePipelinePIEExecutor.h> and <MoviePipelineNewProcessExecutor.h> as a starting point for writing your own behavior for these options to customize the rendering system to match your studio's individual needs.

Adjusting Render Settings

There are three different kinds of options built into Movie Render Queue that you can adjust: Output Format, Rendering, and Settings. To add an option from any of these categories, select +Setting and choose the option you want. Each setting can be toggled on or off without deleting your settings, and each setting may have additional sub-options you can adjust to meet your needs. You can also add custom settings to this list by implementing the UMoviePipelineSetting (MoviePipelineSetting.h) class.

As you adjust your settings, we recommend having at least one Output Format and one Rendering option enabled. Without these, Movie Render Queue will still work, but it will not produce any images or files, and instead will run through the system. This could be useful if you are writing your own setting that may not need to render anything to work.

adding settings

If you want to save your current settings for future use, select Presets > Save as Preset . You can then name and save your preset for future use.

adding a new preset

For detailed explanations of all the settings available, refer to the following pages:

Exporting Media Using Raytracing

Unreal Engine makes real-time ray tracing possible through the use of denoising techniques that may rely on temporal history. When using high-resolution tiling or when disabling Temporal anti-aliasing, you may need to adjust the following console variables for better results:

  • r.AmbientOcclusion.Denoiser.TemporalAccumulation 0

  • r.GlobalIllumination.Denoiser.TemporalAccumulation 0

  • r.Reflections.Denoiser.TemporalAccumulation 0

  • r.Shadow.Denoiser.TemporalAccumulation 0

Setting these variables to 0 will help the denoiser converge better without temporal history. You may also want to consider disabling the following Denoisers entirely if you have a high enough sample count (64+):

  • r.AmbientOcclusion.Denoiser 0

  • r.DiffuseIndirect.Denoiser 0

  • r.Ray tracing.SkyLight.Denoiser 0

  • r.Reflections.Denoiser 0

  • r.Shadow.Denoiser 0

To adjust any of the denoiser settings, you can add them to the Console Variables so they only apply during a render.

ray tracing denoiser console variable settings

Movie Render Queue in Runtime Builds

You can use Movie Render Queue to output Sequencer videos from shipping builds on target platforms and devices. For more information, refer to (Using Movie Render Queue in Runtime Builds)[AnimatingObjects\Sequencer\Workflow\RenderAndExport\HighQualityMediaExport].

Additional Information

For more information on Movie Render Queue, including livestreams and presnetations, see the Inside Unreal: Movie Render Queue Enhancements in 4.26 forum post .

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