Films

A film is a scene's timeline as an H.264 MP4. Puni's film service draws one on Puni's servers from a saved revision of the scene. The local renderer encodes one on your own computer, with the scene's sound.

Open in Puni↗ and choose a scene to open Export.

#Make a film in the studio

What Film does in Export depends on how the studio is set up. Where the studio offers Film on Puni's film service, the film is drawn on Puni's servers. Otherwise Film uses the local renderer on your computer, in a studio set up for one, and is unavailable without one.

#On Puni's film service

Where the studio offers Film on Puni's film service:

1. Press ⌘E and choose Film.
2. Pick a size, then choose Export film. The studio saves the scene first, so the film is of exactly what you saved.
3. The film is queued, rendered and encoded on Puni's servers. You can close Export: the film keeps rendering, and it downloads when it is ready.

The film starts at zero and runs the whole timeline at the scene's frame rate, up to 30 frames a second. It is silent, and it uses the scene's saved shots, or the orbit view when there are none. The download is checked against its checksum, chunk by chunk and as a whole, before it is saved.

Export shows what a film costs before you start. Where this deployment meters hosted renders, a film costs one credit, and a film that fails or is stopped gives it back. When the account has none left, Export links to Settings → Credits.

Export lists this scene's films from the last day, including films an agent made of it, so a reload or another computer finds them. A finished film can be downloaded again until it expires a day after it started. Exporting the same saved scene at the same size again returns the film you already have and is not charged twice.

A film's files count toward the account's 1 GB of storage until they expire a day later.

#With the local renderer

Where the studio does not offer the film service, Film belongs to the local renderer, as Cycles does. It needs a studio set up for the local renderer and a successful health check of the renderer on this computer.

1. Start the local renderer (see Rendering).
2. Press ⌘E, choose Film, and pick a width.
3. Wait for Render finished. The film downloads to your computer.

The studio draws every frame of the timeline at the scene's frame rate and sends them to the renderer, which encodes them with the scene's sound. The frames and the film stay on your computer. Capture is unavailable while the browser draws the scene in a worker.

#When films are unavailable

If Film is unavailable in Export, this studio makes no films on this deployment. Where the deployment renders films, an agent can make one with puni_render_film.

#From the command line

The command line is a preview for Puni's own team: it builds from Puni's private repository and is not published to npm. Where you have it, it renders a film on your own computer through the local renderer, with the scene's sound. Start the local renderer first (see Rendering).

puni render film --file scene.puni.json --output scene.mp4 --width 640 --height 640 --json
puni render film --file scene.puni.json --output preview.mp4 --duration 2 --fps 12 --json

Films use the studio raster. A path-traced film is not offered.

#Local renderer limits

The renderer needs at least 12 GB of free disk before it admits a new film.

Read Covers and pictures for the lighter ways to get a picture out of a scene.