Adobe After Effects CS6 - How To Render and Export Your Video
Rendering and exporting overview
What is rendering?
Rendering is the creation of the frames of a movie from a composition. The rendering of a frame is the creation of a composited two-dimensional image from all the layers, settings, and other information in a composition that makes 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.
It is common to speak of rendering as if this term only applies to final output. However, the processes of creating previews for the Footage, Layer, and Composition panels are also kinds of rendering. In fact, it is possible to save a preview as a movie and use that as your final output.
On this page
Rendering and exporting overview
Render and export with the Render Queue panel
Render and export with Adobe Media Encoder
Supported output formats
Collect files in one location
Specify filenames and locations for rendered output
Render settings
Output modules and output module settings
Encoding and compression options for movies
QuickTime (MOV) encoding and compression settings
Post-render actions
Applies to: After Effects
Last Published: June 29, 2017
Rendering and exporting overview
What is rendering?
Rendering is the creation of the frames of a movie from a composition. The rendering of a frame is the creation of a composited two-dimensional image from all the layers, settings, and other information in a composition that makes 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.
It is common to speak of rendering as if this term only applies to final output. However, the processes of creating previews for the Footage, Layer, and Composition panels are also kinds of rendering. In fact, it is possible to save a preview as a movie and use that as your final output. (See Preview video and audio.)
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. This process of encoding rendered frames into files for output is one kind of exporting.
Note:
See Project settings for more information about project settings that determine how time is displayed in the project, how color data is treated in the project, and what sampling rate to use for audio.
See Composition settings to learn how you can specify composition settings such as resolution, frame size, and pixel aspect ratio for your final rendered output.
After you have completed a composition, you can output a movie file. There are two different methods of outputting a movie file. Choose the one based on your needs.
You might need a movie file for the following reasons:
You need a high-quality movie (with or without an alpha channel) or image sequence that will be placed in a Premiere Pro sequence, or used in another video editing, compositing, or 3D graphics application.
To create a high-quality movie file, render it with the Render Queue. See Render and export with the Render Queue panel.
You need a compressed movie that will be played on the web, or used for DVD or Blu-ray disc.
To create a high-quality movie file that is compressed for the web, DVD, or Blu-ray disc, encode it using the Adobe Media Encoder.
A movie can be made into a single output file that contains all 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).
To generate output, you can either render your compositions using the After Effects render queue or add your compositions to the Adobe Media Encoder queue with the render settings that you have chosen in the Render Queue panel.
For the Render Queue, After Effects uses an embedded version of the Adobe Media Encoder to encode most movie formats through the Render Queue panel. When you manage render and export operations with the Render Queue panel, the embedded version of the Adobe Media Encoder is called automatically. The Adobe Media Encoder appears only in the form of the export settings dialog boxes with which you specify some encoding and output settings.
Render and export with the Render Queue panel
The primary way of rendering and exporting movies from After Effects is through the Render Queue panel.
When you place a composition into the Render Queue panel, it becomes a render item. You can add many render items to the render queue, and After Effects can render multiple items in a batch, unattended. When you click the Render button in the upper-right corner of the Render Queue panel, all items with the status of Queued are rendered and output in the order in which they are listed in the Render Queue panel.