Rob Pieké

We have an open RFE to improve this. Further complicating this is that we move active renders (e.g., Live Render) to the left edge of the strip, in an attempt to highlight them, but I appreciate it makes the situation you're reporting even more awkward.

I'm not quite sure what the issue you're running into is. Can you please send us a hip file?

Thanks for clarifying #1. This would be a sensible future area of investigation for us. We do provide "baked-in" controls for this via the Render Geometry Settings (https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/lop/rendergeometrysettings.html), but for deferred rendertime evaluation we currently only support what's in the vanilla USD specification.

If you could log an RFE for this, that would be great!