14.4 Rendering a Video Clip

Videos are made by combining a series of video clips (short sections of video). Video clips are

made from animation frames compiled into a sequence. Before you can render a video file you

must have an animation sequence.

The Perpetual Motion sequence ( Chapter 11 – 11.10) has created an Animation Sequence.

To Render the animation click Render in the Screen Header and select Render Animation or

press (Ctrl + F12).

Note: You may also render an Image from this location.

Blender Render will open and start making an image for each

frame of the animation and save it to the tmp Folder. The reason

for Rendering an image for each frame is that the default output

file type is PNG which is an image file. The same thing would

happen if you had JPEG selected. On a Windows 10 System the

/tmp\ Folder is located in the C: directory: (Hard Drive).

Figure 14.7

created in the /tmp\

folder

Figure 14.8

The File Path

The first four PNG files

To playback your rendered animation from within Blender you go to the 2D Viewport Editor

Header and click on Render and select View Animation (Figure 14.6). Click Esc to quit

Playing the animation at this stage is simply cycling through the sequence of image files that has

been created in the /tmp\ Folder. Ten Bouncing Ball image files constitute a very very basic

animation. Animations can run to thousands of image files which would accumulate and create a

massive storage problem on your hard drive. To save space you render the animation sequence

to a Movie File.

In the Properties Editor, Output Properties, Output

Tab, change the default PNG to one of the

options, for example AVI Raw, which is a video file

format (Figure 14.9). Video file formats compress the

data from the rendered animation into a

instead of the series of image files.

Important: Before you Render with the video file

format clean out the tmp folder.

Movie

single file

Figure 14.9

148