WEBVTT

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Oftentimes, the most important thing to get right about your render output is your output

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file itself.

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The settings for this can be found in the output category in your output properties

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tab.

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This is the tab labeled with a printer icon.

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Here you can immediately see a line where you specify your file output path.

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Simply click on the folder icon to open the file browser for easy navigation, or left

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click the path and type it manually.

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You will want to make sure to include a file name at the end of this path, but don't include

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the extension, as that will be provided for you as a checkbox below.

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Very quickly, I'll go over these checkboxes.

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Overwrite is a checkbox to specify that if a file name is identical, simply overwrite

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it without confirmation.

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This is on by default for a reason, because if you check this off and you start a render

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after already rendering your scene once, the files generated by the previous render

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will not be updated, therefore your new render will not be recorded.

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There are times where you would want this, but most of the time I recommend leaving this

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checked on.

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Placeholders is a great way to create the file name before the render finishes.

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By default, the file itself does not get generated until the render is done with that frame.

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Cache results will save your render cache, aka your slots, as an open EXR file, which

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can sometimes speed up compositing calculations in post-processing.

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This is relatively situational and default settings for all four of these checkboxes

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are typically fine.

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Next, you have your file format.

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This should be familiar territory if you've ever worked with images or videos before.

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PNG is a great image file format to use, and your render will output each frame as a separate

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PNG file on your hard drive.

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Feel free to use any of the other file format options Blender has available.

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If you choose a movie file, you'll have an additional section called Encoding that has

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settings you should tweak.

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For starters, your actual file extension will be specified by the container value.

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Also, to make sure you include any existing audio in your render, make sure to select

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an audio codec from the drop-down menu.

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Quick and very important tip, even if you're rendering an animation, it is recommended

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to output image sequences instead of movie files.

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This is because in case your render fails midway, the files up to that point for your

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image sequence have already been output, so you can still pick up where your image sequence

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left off.

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However, if you are rendering a movie file format, a render that fails halfway will never

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even become a single file, as it will output a corrupted incomplete file leaving you to

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start over completely from frame 1.

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Color type lets you choose between black and white, RGB, or RGB plus alpha.

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RGB A allows your images to include transparency and is usually recommended, especially if

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you're rendering out passes.

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Color depth changes the amount of color information in your image.

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Compression simply affects the file size of your output.

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Now that we've gotten those settings out of the way, let's quickly show how this works.

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I'm going to go ahead and animate my cube really quick.

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I can then render it out by going to the render menu.

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Here we have two options, render image or render animation.

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If you were to select render animation, you would see the output files being automatically

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generated for you like so.

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For hotkey users, you can simply press Ctrl F12.

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Once your rendered animation is done, you can also view your rendered animation by going

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to the render menu and selecting view animation.

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For hotkey users, you can simply press Ctrl F11.

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Now if you were to select render image instead of render animation, Blender will not output

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a file for you automatically, as this would actually overwrite a lot of important frames

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when running single frame test renders.

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But let me show you how to save a single frame if you need it.

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Let's go back to the render menu and select render image.

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For hotkey users, you can simply press F12.

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From the new render window, which is simply an image editor popped out, you can go to

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the image menu at the top and select save as.

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This will allow you to save the image as a new file using the output settings you specified

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in the properties editor.

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If you don't see this new render window, simply go to the render menu and select view render.

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For hotkey users, you can press F11.