Evening…
I need help and preferably before I shut down my Mac for the night … I just finished rendering 500 frames of animation but I can’t for the life of me seem to save them as a movie!
It would be a shame to lose it all just because of my own ineptitude!
many thanks!
Marco
edit: seems I screwed up already - that gives everyone a nice extra 20 minutes to reply
edit #2: was: “How to actually save a movie to disk (Mac)?”
You should have set an animation file to save to before you rendered. Your animation was most likely saved to the default save path, for windows it is c:/tmp. You can check yours by looking at the scene window, hit f10 in your buttons panel. Chances are if you didn’t choose a path and filename to save it to, you didn’t select a format either, so your animation will be a bunch of image files.
You should copy and paste those image files into an animation folder and I’m sure there’s some kind of program to change your images into say an avi or something or you could just re render with the proper settings. If it was a high quality render 500 frames would take a long time though.
Don’t render as stills next time – choose Quicktime or AVI to begin with. Well, unless you’re going to be doing something with those stills – but I would assume that you’d have a compositing program if that were the case (like After Effects).
And yeah, you need to move your tmp directory – the default location is hidden on a Mac computer. In the Render section, look under “Output” and select a new tmp directory.
If your animation is taking a long time to render, you might consider testing it out at a smaller size to see if it’s working like you want it to – look under “Render” and change 100% to 50% or 25% and you can test it out at a smaller size before committing to the full render.
rendering in stills is the right way to go. if you choose avi or mov and something goes wrong, or your computer crahses or sth, ALL rendering time will be wasted.
when rendering is finished, you take your image sequence ( in your case probably in tmp-folder, as mentioned before)and put them in blender’s sequencer. there you can make fade-in/out, glow effect etc. and add audio. when finished, render that as a movie. choose ffmpeg in output panel, in video-panel “xvid” and in audio-panel enable “multiplex”. no need for other tools. http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Using_VSE
I also had a look in the archive and came up with some info about the blender file system. So I made a folder before rendering and lo, the .mov went there.
Definitely will have a look at those third party utilities too.
Marco
FWIW here’s what I came up with, so you know your tips are going somewhere.