Hi! I was wandering how to change a rendered animation in Cycles Render to a movie file, (either .mov or .mp4) so that it can then be edited in other programs, or on another computer. If anyone has any ideas, they would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
You have to use an external file format converter.
well just save it as a video
under the output there is support for ogv , x264 , mpeg
well just save it as a video
Possible, the fastest and easiest way, and there might be situations where this is good enough. But i wouldn’t really recommend it. The golden rule is always render single images. Then convert the single image sequence to a movie.
Nearly every video editing software can make movies from images. Even the freeware Windows Movie maker can do this afaik. There are also some file converter that eats single images and outputs videos. But they cannot do the job of video editing. To add sound for example.
When you plan to do such a job regularly then i would recommend one of the commercial solutions because they provide more posibilities. Magix video deluxe, Pinnacle Studio, Cyberlink Power Director etc. . Try them out, have a look at your budget, then decide.
The reason why you should go with single images is that a already rendered movie comes with compression. And when you want to edit this video then, to add voice samples or sound FX for example, then you add another compression over it. The compression artifacts will add to each other, the quality of the images will sink. The second reason is that you can always interrupt the rendering of image sequences ( sometimes it gets interrupted by a crash) . And continue then. Doesn’t work when you directly render to avi or mpeg.
To cut exact to add video fx and blend effects is also better done with single images. Here you may also stumble into the adding compression artifacts trap with an already rendered movie.
Use a lossless image format to keep the file size of the rendered images low. I would recommend *.png. Hands away from jpeg. That’s a lossy compression format, and produces artifacts.