Blender Foundations

Chapter 14

Video Compilation and Final Output

Creating Animation Files

You have an animation that plays back with Alt-A. You know how to render. The last step in putting this whole thing together is rendering for animation. Blender lets you choose animation formats (Quicktime, AVI, MPEG) for direct output from the renderer, but that is usually not a good way to go. Rendering your animation directly to a single file can be fraught with peril. Well, as much peril as you’re likely to face in 3D. Imagine hitting the button to render your 125-frame animation, each frame of which takes four minutes to render, and learning after eight and a half hours that your animation compression settings were lousy. That’s depressing. Even if you get it right, ...