How to render or export your After Effects animation

Hi there, in this video were going to look at rendering or exporting your video from after effects. So rendering or exporting, it doesn’t really matter what you call it, it’s the same thing. So what were going to do is try and make a video at the end. And were going to try and make an mp4, an mp4 is the most common video format now, it plays online, its good for broadcast, there's all sorts of good uses for mp4’s. So, lets go and do it.

So lets go to composition and lets go to add to media encoder, so you can go, there's lots of different ways, you can go to export to media encoder, queue, you can go to this one in here, the shortcuts great, it doesn’t really matter which one you go to. Lets probably go this way, file, export, add to media encoder queue, now you can render this straight from after effects, now that’s totally fine and it works in a very similar sort of way. The reason we don’t do that is that after effects while its rendering cant do anything else, you're stuck waiting for it to finish. Where as if you send it off to this separate program called adobe media encoder its just a separate program and he's got one function in the world, its to render video, the cool thing about him is he can sneak in the background, be rendering your videos and you can continue on your merry way, making new after effects stuff. So that’s why we like it. So were going to go add to adobe media encoder queue.

Now, its going to be, it’s a separate program on your machine, it will start loading up in the background like my one will eventually, now one thing to note is that its going to be rendering the version that I have open, I had, can you see I had this first one we did and its got nothing in it, we can get rid of him, but I had this one open which if I double click him and if I send it to adobe media encoder its going to render this one, this blank video. So make sure you’ve got the comp you want to render open then go to add to media queue and then it opens up. Lovely.

Now, the awesome thing is, by default its already set. It’s going to be h264, its going to be match source, its going to be the same as we made it and its going to put it in the right folder. So at this stage, all were going to do is click play and were not going to worry about too much more of the details. Later on in the video towards the end were going to get into some fun stuff when we talk about codex and were going to talk about getting the file size really small and all sorts of other stuff but at the moment, this is all you really need to get started is this is going to make you a video at the right size that you made it at the right format that’s really good and shareable at a place where its easily found and its lovely. The cool thing about it is remember it’s in this other program called adobe media encoder, it gets installed without you asking. If I jump into after effects look I can still work in here.

So instead of getting After Effects all tied up doing stuff. It’s up to you. Aright, speed, speed, speed. It’s a pretty small one so you can see it rendering down here. Now, where it puts it is a little weird, so its put it into the, it’s a bit long that one here. But its on my computer here, what you're looking for is where you have saved your documents. That’s the file I was working on, my after effects ap. This is my after effects projects. And what happens is when you hit the play, it goes and makes a folder here with the same name and it adds this underscore ame for adobe media encoder and inside there, that one there is my particle background, it gets this name from, if I jump back into after effects, is from my comp, so when you're naming your comps, you can save some time by just giving it a name that you know you're going to use later on, so its called particle background and there he is there. This thing here don’t worry about, you may or may not have this one, its just a temporary file, its just disappears later on. Its only the mp4 we want, this is just a little file that I like to check out to see, for no special reason.

So you're looking for the mp4, you can see its 3.7 MB. I double click it, massive, I hit play, ooooh motion blur, easing, pauses, little particles fall and eventually it drops off. Great, so that’s my little mp4 and that is the basics for exporting. There's not much more to that, if you want to get more nerdy you can skip along to one of the later videos where we go through a bit more advanced exporting.

Aright, ill see you in the next video.