Randy Jones

Render_node is a Jitter patch. I made Render_node to scratch my own itch: the need to record my Jitter work in high-resolution without having to invest in some expensive HD-capture setup. Of course, being a generally nerdy type of person, I had to make a general solution which would work for myself as well as others. The basic idea is to record in realtime only a few parameters which drive your rendering patch. Then render_node creates "fake realtime" (using MSP's NonRealTime driver) and uses texture readback to record each frame to disk as quickly as possible, which, for big sizes, may be not very.

I added some other nice things like temporal antialiasing (motion blur), the ability to render through plugin shaders, a timeline for looping and scrubbing through a patch, preroll countdown, and a preview window which is very useful for live performance. These things are practical answers to questions which I saw come up on the Jitter list time and time again. Making my patches compatible with render_node lets me bridge the gap between live performance and offline capture, a gap which used to be large. I can capture a successful live performance with little overhead, then do an offline rendering to any resolution.

One thing render_node could use is a "quick start" guide of a few pages. I haven't been bothered to make one yet, because I think anyone using Jitter can probably figure it out from the help window and popup hints wihtout too much trouble. There's a little text file right now. But a pdf guide would be friendlier. If you want to contribute one, or if you have any fixes, please send them.

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