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Hello, probably it is a very straight forward workflow, but just in case if anyone also face the same problem.

So I was rendering animation with some custom alpha channels, however in the end of the day (or in my case I would say in the end of the month, as I started rendering this animation before NY ))) ) I found out that I made a mistake with setting up the custom alpha (I only went half way, creating custom channels in render settings and not assigning them to object groups) so I've got my animation (which looks pretty good itself) without any custom alpha channels.

But I want those, as I want to do some adjustments and compositing .. so my workflow as follows:
(by the way I'm using Maya)

1 - in render channels - I'm switching off "render color" and basically everything except alpha and custom alpha.
2 - in render layers - I'm switching of everything (Direct lighting, indirect lighting, etc)

and basically that's it.
I think I should get the fastest possible result for rendering only custom alpha channels.
If you think there is something else which could be improved for faster rendering of those channels - please suggest.

Cheers,
Tim.

Make a simple emitter material and apply to everything in the scene. It will give you a dramatic speed-up in alpha-only rendering.

oh WOW - thanks tom!
That is SUPER useful.

I'm going to try it.
That's awesome, thanks