This is probably SO simple to do...

Support Basics & Interface
1

You can skip to the bottom and save yourself from my boring story…

So far, I’ve been doing quite a bit of animating… without much saving of the animations. I know how to save my rendered images, but I still don’t know how to save my rendered animations. Every time they’ve been short enough for me not to care if I save it or not.

I have now reached the point of my caring. My animation is a little longer (about a minute) and I’m proud enough to save it instead of just rendering it. But, before I embark on trial and error every few hours of attempting to save it and/or render it multiple times, I would just like to know ahead of time.

Right before I clicked the render button, I realized that that probably won’t save the video. I checked on Google on how, and I think I’ve got all of the steps down, except for one thing… there’s three outputs in all of the instructions I’ve seen, and I want to make sure I’m doing this right.

Question(s): What do I do with the output to make sure I save it? Is there only supposed to be two outputs like I see? After I render it can I just close it and it will be fine?

Thank you in advance.

Waits patiently

2

To save anything, first thing you want to do of course is create a path for where your rendered material is going to be.

You do that by of course going to your render buttons. From there, under Output, click on the first option and give it a name and destination.

From there, under Format, well, select your format lol. After that you can go on ahead and hit that big Animate button.

Hopefully this has helped. If not, I can explain more.

3

There’ a difference between saving the animation, and RENDERING the animation.

When you save the .blend file, with File save, the animation … and everything else in the .blend file, is of course saved. Pressing ALT-A … or the “VCR” buttons on the timeline will playback the animation in the viewport.

To “save” a movie, i.e. “render” it, look under the “Anim” section of the Rendering section in the manual :

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Rendering_Animations

Mike

4

Thanks! The link helped clear some stuff up. It’s just a confusing interface problem (I wish there was a little save animation button, but alas…)

Well, now I know I was doing it right.