Late yesterday I started to render a 42 second animation in Visualize 2018 Professional. I am using Fast render (with 200 passes?) and 30 fps. I use Visualize Queue. The animation movement was imported from SW2018. Any color changes and/or part fades in & out were done in Visualize. It is still running, so I have had time to think about render times.

My animation has several periods where there is no movement or color changes.

I started a spreadsheet to track the time stamps on the individual frames. I did every 30 th frame to see how many minutes to render each second of animation.

I see that the "static" parts of the animation took 21 to 28 minutes per second. And it took 36 to 40 minutes to render each second that had motion and/or color changes.

My question is:

If there is a period of no changes in an animation, why does Visualize bother to re-render those frames? Why not just save the last rendered frame with the next frame number?

As a work-around, for my next animation I will just render the periods with motion. Then manually duplicate the first static frame as many times as necessary for that static period. I would have to manually rename those copied frames to be in numeric order. Then I would use QuickTime Pro to stitch all those frames into a MOV file. Then save it out as MP4.

Does anyone have a better workflow?