will stopping an animation render mid-way still save the progress? I'm trying to render an animation in blender and midway, I want to stop the animation and I'm wondering if it still renders the frames in the mp4 file and saves?
Answer: no.
We generally make our animation renders as a PNG or EXR image sequence, and then we transform the image sequence in the final .mp4 (this latter render is very fast).
The advantages are that you can stop the render in midway, if there's a crash or an electric failure you don't loose the previous computing, you store maximum uncompressed quality, you can store layers for later compositing, and so on.