Video & image export

Render the graph to a movie file or a sequence of frames: MP4, WebM, or PNG/TIFF/EXR/JPEG stills.

The Video type renders frame by frame into a single file; the Image type writes one file per frame. Pick a resolution, a frame range, a quality preset and a format; each frame is cooked, rendered, and handed to the encoder.

All of it is driven from the Export panel. Choose the settings, watch the bottom bar for a red Error: line, and press Export.

Video files

Video encoding shells out to FFmpeg, which has to be installed and on your path. Nothing is bundled. The panel runs ffmpeg -version before a video render starts and reports FFmpeg not found. Install FFmpeg for video export. if it is missing.

The panel offers two video formats:

FormatCodecBest for
MP4H.264The universal default. Plays everywhere, always opaque
WebMVP9Web delivery, and the only video format in the panel that keeps transparency

ProRes (MOV, with alpha on the 4444 variants) and H.265 are fully encoded but are filtered out of the panel's format list. Reach them from the graph instead: Export's codec parameter carries ProRes 4444, ProRes 422, H.264, H.265 and VP9.

For a transparent background, use WebM (VP9) with Alpha ticked, or ProRes 4444 through Export. A still sequence keeps transparency too: PNG and TIFF with Alpha channel ticked, or EXR, which always carries it.

Image sequences

For maximum quality, or to take frames into another app for compositing and grading, render a sequence. Files are named frame_0000, frame_0001 and so on, numbered from the start of the range rather than from the timeline frame, so a 100 to 110 render still begins at frame_0000.

Tick Cryptomatte (sibling EXR) under an EXR format and each frame gets a second file beside it, frame_0000.cryptomatte.exr, holding ranked per-object coverage layers and the manifest that names them. Nuke, Fusion and Resolve read it directly, so you can pull a matte for any object in the scene after the fact instead of re-rendering. It is off by default because the coverage buffers it needs are expensive, and it costs nothing while it is off.

Sequences are written directly and need no FFmpeg. They are also the safest way to render a very long or very heavy job, because each frame is its own file.

Quality

Quality trades file size against fidelity, and applies to H.264 and VP9:

PNG, TIFF and EXR are always lossless, so the preset does not reach them. JPEG has its own quality value instead.

How an exported frame is rendered

An export does not simply screenshot the viewport. A frame carrying a 3D scene is rendered several times with the camera nudged by a fraction of a pixel each time, and those passes are averaged, which is what gives exported edges their smoothness. How many passes depends on the composition's render mode: a realtime 3D composition renders 16, and a path-traced one renders as many as its Render node's sample count asks for, in submissions of eight at a time, so the frame that lands is fully converged rather than the noisy single sample the viewport shows while you work. A purely 2D graph has no scene to jitter, so it renders once.

That is why a path-traced export takes far longer than the same range rendered realtime, and why raising the sample count on the Render node raises export time in step with it. The progress bar counts passes rather than frames, so a slow frame still moves it.

Resolution & frame range

The output resolution follows the canvas, 1920×1080 unless you have changed it, until you tick Custom Resolution. The frame range does not follow the project: the panel opens on 0 to 120 at 60 fps whatever the timeline holds, so set Start, End and FPS for every render.

HDR is not carried through. A composition working in PQ or HLG is tagged as plain sRGB in PNG, TIFF, MP4 and WebM, because none of those can hold the signal. The downgrade is recorded in the log and is not shown in the panel. To preserve the full range, render an EXR sequence, which is written scene-referred and linear.

See also