Chapter 18: Rendering And Exporting; Basics Of Rendering And Exporting - Adobe AFTER EFFECTS CS3 PROFESSIONAL User Manual

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Chapter 18: Rendering and exporting

When you are done creating your movie in After Effects, you need to output the movie to a file that can be played,
used by software like Adobe Premiere Pro in the creation of a larger movie, or transferred to another medium. After
Effects can create files for television, transfer to film, playback on mobile devices, and many, many other media.

Basics of rendering and exporting

About rendering and exporting
Rendering is the creation of the finished frames of a movie from a composition. The rendering of a frame is the
creation of a composited two-dimensional image from all of the layers, settings, and other information in a compo-
sition that make up the model for that image. The rendering of a movie is the frame-by-frame rendering of each of
the frames that make up the movie. For more information on how each frame is rendered, see "Render order and
collapsing transformations" on page 119.
After a composition is rendered for final output, it is processed by one or more output modules that encode the
rendered frames into one or more output files.
A movie can be made into a single output file (such as a Flash Video movie) that contains all of the rendered frames,
or it can be made into a sequence of still images (as you would do when creating output for a film recorder).
Though it is common to speak of rendering as if this term only applies to final output, the processes of creating
previews to show in the Footage, Layer, and Composition panels are also kinds of rendering. In fact, it is possible to
save a RAM preview as a movie and use that as your final output. (See "Preview video and audio" on page 124.)
Note: Some kinds of exporting don't involve rendering and are for intermediate stages in a workflow, not for final output.
For example, you can export a project as an Adobe Premiere Pro Project by choosing File > Export > Adobe Premiere
Pro Project. The project information is saved without rendering.
To see a video tutorial on rendering and exporting, visit the Adobe website at www.adobe.com/go/vid0262.
After Effects provides a variety of formats and compression options for output. Which format and compression
options you choose depends on how your output will be used. For example, if the movie that you render from After
Effects is the final product that will be played directly to an audience, then you need to consider the medium from
which you'll play the movie and what limitations you have on file size and data rate. By contrast, if the movie that
you create from After Effects is an intermediate product that will be used as input to a video editing system, then you
should output without compression to a format compatible with the video editing system.
In the Render Queue panel, you can manage several render items at once, each with its own render settings and
output module settings. Render settings determine such characteristics as output frame rate, duration, resolution,
and layer quality. Output module settings—which are applied after render settings—determine such post-rendering
characteristics as output format, compression options, cropping, and whether to embed a link to the project in the
output file. You can create templates that contain commonly used render settings and output module settings. Using
the Render Queue panel, you can render the same composition to different formats or with different settings, all with
one click of the Render button:
• You can output to a sequence of still images, such as a Cineon sequence, which you can then transfer to film for
cinema projection.