How to Render Your 3d Animation to a Video File (Blender Tutorial)

in this tutorial I will show you how to render your blender 3D animation into a video file and that way you'll be able to watch the video and show it to other people and upload it online in the blend file that I'm using as an example is the finished project files of my sci-fi security drone tutorial Series so if you'd like to check out that tutorial the link will be in the description so the first thing that you need to do is make sure that your scene is all ready for animation so when you click right up here on render and then click on render image or use the shortcut key of F12 you should be happy with the final result so make sure that your scene is using the correct render engine that you want to use in this case I'm using EV but you could also use Cycles also make sure that you're using the amount of samples that you want and check over all your render settings and also if you want to do any compositing make sure you've set that all up so if you don't have the compositing tab you can click on the plus here you can click on General and then you can click on compositing so if you want to do any compositing you could set that up and also if you click right here on the output properties make sure that the scene is being rendered at the resolution that you want and then the other thing to check is the frame rate right down here and I'm using the default frame rate which is 24 frames per second so once you've set up all the render settings and you like how the finished result is we need to tell blender to render out all of the frames into individual files in a folder on our computer now if you click right here on the output properties and open up this output you're going to want to choose a file format and most of the time you're going to want to choose a PNG file format because a PNG is a lossless image meaning that it won't lose any of its quality whereas if you change this to a JPEG image the image size will be a bit smaller but it'll lose a little bit of the quality so in most cases you're going to want to use the PNG now you may be wondering why you can't just click here on the file format and choose ffmpeg video and render this directly out to a video file well you can do that if you want to but in most cases I would recommend not doing that and why you don't want to directly render your 3D animation to a video file is because while you're rendering if blender crashes then the file is going to become corrupt or let's say you're rendering the 3D scene and then blender just runs out of memory then the render would stop and then the file wouldn't be complete or the file might become corrupt and so you'd have to re-render it all over again or if your computer crashes or loses power or gets turned off for some reason then again the file is going to become corrupt if it hasn't finished yet and the benefits of rendering out two image files first is that if for some reason you want to pause or stop the render halfway through and you can just hit the Escape key while it's rendering and that's going to stop the render and then you can just check and see how many frames it's rendered and then here on the start frame on the timeline you can just set this to the number that you want to start as and then you can click on render and render animation again and also if you're looking through the rendered frames and you see a few glitches or problems with some of the renders and you can just go back to that frame you can fix the error and then just re-render that frame so now that we've set the file format to PNG we want to click on this little file icon right here and this is going to save an output to save the images so then you can just locate to a a folder where you have your project files and then I'm going to click on the plus here to add a new folder and I could just call this like rendered frames then I could go inside this folder and then I can click on the accept button and then you can click here on render and click on render animation or you can use the shortcut key which is control F12 so the animation is finished and I've located to the folder where I save the images and you can see it saved all the images by the frame number so I can open up these images and I can look through them and I can make sure I like how they look now to turn all of the rendered images into a video file we just need to use some sort of video editor so if you use some other video editing program then you can just use that and you can add in the frames as an image sequence I'm going to use blender's video editor so if you don't have the video editing tab right up here then you can click on the plus and you can go down here to video editing and click on video editing you can also click right up here on file and then you can click on new and then you can choose video editing so I can press shift a and then I want to click right here on the image or sequence and then you you can just locate to the folder where you have saved all the images now I'm going to press the a key and that'll select all the images now before we click on the add image strip it's really important that we click on this Arrow here on the display settings and we need to click the sort by to name because right now you can see that some of the frames are random so we need these to be in the correct order so you can click right here and you can click on name instead and then you can just click on ADD image strip so I can now press the space bar and that is going to play the animation and then we need to set the end frame so the end frame was 300 frames so right here on the end frame I can type in 300 and then you also need to make sure that the resolution and the frame rate is the same as the blend file that you render the animation and then of course here in the video editor you could add text or effects and you could also add music and sound effects and just do all of the video editing so we can now render this out to a final animation so what you want to do is Click around the output properties and I'm going to open up the output here and right here we can choose a location for blender to render out the video so let's click on the file icon and then I will locate to the folder with my other project files and right down here I'm going to give this a name and I'm going to call it final animation and then you can click on the accept button now right here on the file format if you chose the video editing layout like I did it should already set this to ffmpeg video but if it hasn't then you can choose the ffmpic video you could use some of these other formats if you wanted to but ffmpeg video will probably be best for most things that you're doing and then I'll also show you the other settings that I like to use and I believe these settings are on the default in blender but I'm just going to open up the encoding right here and I like to use the container of mpeg4 and then the video Codec I use 8.264 and the output quality I set to medium quality and the encoding speed I have set it good and then if you have any audio then you can choose an audio codec and I like to use AAC or if you don't have any audio like in this animation here you can just change this to no audio and then you can render this out to a final video by clicking on render and then you can choose render animation or again you can use Ctrl F12 which is the shortcut and then here on my computer here is the final animation so that is how you render out your 3D animations to a video file in blender and if you'd like to help support this channel I will have links in the description to my gumroad store and my patreon page and the YouTube memberships and if you'd like to learn how to create this sci-fi security drone then I'll have a link to the tutorial Series in the description but I hope you found this helpful and thank you for watching

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 191,180

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Tutorial, render to video file, rendering, blender video edit, animation to video file, blender animation, Render Your 3d Animation

Id: OENbinegV2c

Length: 6min 31sec (391 seconds)

Published: Thu May 04 2023