a seemingly Basic feature is missing. Pause / Resume

Yes! This could be a very good and useful idea, because FF takes almost all the CPU usage and leaves very little to do any other thing while rendering a very long render, specially one that can take many hours and even days on a very slow filter, high resolution and maybe slow computer.

As you say, is a basic and simple feature that seems that nobody (neither myself) has tought about it, and I agree that would be good to have and think that would be easy to add as a feature.

Other alternative would be to make FF faster than it is, but I do not think that this would be true anytime soon, although even then, it would still be good to have this "pause render"

Why not use a third-party tool for that? Process Explorer or even better PsSuspend can freeze running processes.

I'm not a Mac user but Google finds many instructions on using the killall -STOP command on Macs.

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GMM Why not use a third-party tool for that? Process Explorer or even better PsSuspend can freeze running processes

WOW! I have already Process Explorer and use it much, BUT did not know that you could PAUSE any application, I only have used it to kill a process, application or service

And perhaps is even better your alternative PsSuspend

Thanks GMM for the news and suggestion about this

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Skybase guess SpaceRay should join as a programmer and add all these amazing "easy to add" features to FilterForge. Right? After all... these features are "easy to add"

Like much your polite comment

Is true that I do not know nearly nothing about programming, and most of the times I speak, think and suppose things without knowing really how easy or hard could be to make something, and I am sorry for this as is not a good thing to do and give an opinion abouit something you really do not know, but on this one I said it would be "easy to add" because I do not think that stopping and pausing the rendering should be something very hard, complex and difficult to make and do not think there could be any technical or other problems.

What I like from this is that I have NOT thought about the GMM clever and very good alternative and that it is really not needed to be included in FF to be able to do it.

Also Is true that I can´t continue putting things like "easy to add" or "this does have to be much complex" or whatever if I really do not know about it and can´t really measure it and have a any proof about it

Thanks also to Skybase for his comment

I've been using Sysinternals stuff for years and never considered using Process Explorer to pause FF or other programs - I usually just use it to find dependencies and such - great idea.

While you are discussing the pause option I remember some program I used that allowed incremental processing. For example say the processing invovles three distinct steps you would get an option to

Start
Step1 completed. Continue to Step 2 or Cancel?

etc

I haven't thought through all the implications but since we are on the subject figured I'd add my 2 cents.

It doesn't sound like FF's gonna be on it for a while. I think the small team they got just can't put their hands on the feature. Although I keep saying it'd be a neat feature anyway.

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Soooo, WOW ... this topic is almost A YEAR AND A HALF old and we still don't have a simple pause button?

Don't wanna conjure up an argument but I just can't stand reading that, even if it's directed at FilterForge. You use the term "simple" here in terms of its concept. The pause button is a simple idea, but for the sake of it, it's also a complicated operation. As an example, a bunch of render engines for 3D software don't feature a pause button. If there were one, it's typically presented as a major feature of the program. And considering the reason why you'd "pause" anything, you'd want the user to be able to return to that state of render at any time, hence you typically have a feature to save a special file that can do that.

So you kinda have to think fr om a practicality mindset. Just "pausing" a render, to me, sounds like nothing useful. I'd be wondering why that button would be there for. The ability to save a state is what changes the whole game. There's only one mention of this in the entire thread.

You know, in the end everything feels like super long... like you might be thinking "oh wow! This is ridiculous" but it's really not. FilterForge isn't Adobe, wh ere they have 1000s of employees each specializing in a feature or functionality or UI or QA or betatesting or whatever. In the end, to me, when people write as if software companies haven't done anything, those statements sounds ridiculous and rather blind to how software is made... or for that matter, how anything and everything is made. It takes years. While I don't wanna stand in any defense, the reason why I'm putting this point down is because you sound like my clients who thinks I can achieve top-notch quality 2 minute motion graphics in 2 day with a pay little as $200.

To be fair though, its not a bad idea. Just needs more thought and less aggressive wording.

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My point was, if there's software that I can download (like everyone mentioned above) that will pause the FF render process, thus "hacking" FF into pausing the render, then yes ... in my eyes, it seems simple enough to implement within FF.

Yeah but in the end that's a "hack" method. Do you really want that in a professional piece of software? I'm in the super busy industry with big-budget clients... I need assets done by a certain due date and I'm paid some cash for it, and I rely on my software. Do I want a lousy implementation of any feature in the software I use? No. I want a polished piece of software that runs 99.9% of the time.

I'm really just saying it's not that simple as you put it. This "Pause button" basically has to behave on both operating systems, has to have a practical purpose and a reason, it has to be useful in FilterForge (for example, can you run another render while you pause something? Can you render component previews still? Can you still preview up-stream components while you have another component on pause? etc). It should serve more purposes than just one (for example, save a render state).

I highly doubt it's anywhere near simple.

Just a note on "addressing" points. You know, in the software industry, game development, content-creation industries, we really really don't say what we're making or doing. This is actually a responsibility. If we say that we can or can't do something, then we'd really be hitting ourselves... because what if we can't deliver that thing we announced? Or what if we could... but we already announced that we can't? It's all about making sure you can safely develop what you need to make. You need time to properly address, plan, develop, and test your ideas before you can properly assure audiences that what you made is worth the price.

Audiences always want to know what's up coming, but all of that is behind closed doors. Lately there's been a mild movement towards having an open appearance through social media and blogs, but this is just "appearance", it's a company image. You're really not getting any insight into what's actually in development.

The point is this, FilterForge is probably listening, just not responding for all sorts of reasons. While I don't like silence myself, and I do agree that maybe a bit of insight would be a nice warm-fuzzy thing, but a business is a business. It's a tough world where assumptions can hit you really really hard later.

I personally have first hand experience of how awful things can get... just because you say "Oh I can do that."

That's just some perspective on things.