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Paul Fierlinger wrote:BTW, what is the function of the Data Rate and Compute?

This sets the rates at which "proxy" and "render" modes cache to the drive.
When you use the 'compute' function, it tests the maximal (optimal?) rate in which data can be written to the drive you set as a scratch drive.
If you use the computed data rate, it will render in high quality. But despite the computed rate, the preview is still often not smooth (something I can't figure out why...). In order to work better, you can manually set the data rate to a lower factor, and the rendering time will be much quicker. In fact, usually you can set the rate to much lower than the computed rate, and you will still see no degradation in image quality, but since less information per frame was written to the drive, it will read off the drive at a higher rate.
When I'm testing animation, if "realtime" mode slows down my previews, I usually work in "proxy" mode at 10.00 MB/s. It gives me enough image resolution to see what's there, and provides full frame rate to preview the motion.

One significant improvement is the bug fix of the source project not resorting automatically to NONE BKG mode. It is not necessary anymore to remember to manually turn BKG off before using KF in a secondary project. On the other hand, when re-rendering one has to first manually clear all the previous frames -- before Mirage did this automatically. If you won't clear the layer your re-rendered frames will end up being superimposed on top of the previous render. Is there some advantage to this change that I haven't grasped yet, or is it an oversight?

Again, I can't stress enough how wonderful it is that projects are preserved with all their settings. If I have to work between more than two projects while using the KeyFramer, each project retains its own settings of the KF as I toggle between them. This takes a lot of the confusion out of working with several projects.