Have you ever renderd an animation then realised that you renderd stills and not a video format by accident and don’t know what to do, or used a render farm and end up with a bunch of images ? well you have came to the right place to learn how to make them in to video format using the Video Sequense Editor in Blender 2.5.

It is actually very wise to render stills over video format anyway, because if you have a project that is going to take over 3 days to render and you start to render the animation and on the last day you have a powercut, it would be a desaster, you would loose everything. Thats why using stills as the output is wise because you can give your computer a rest after a few hundred frames or so and then come back to finish them off another time.

 

21 Comments

 

  1. 13 Mar ’11  3:11 am by James

    And where you got all of those images from? I don't understand this tutorial.

    • 13 Mar ’11  6:40 am by Rex Harby

      You get them from rendering an animation in stills (preferd), if you still don't understand read the text above the video :)

  2. 13 Mar ’11  4:57 pm by Andy

    @James: A lot of people render video as individual frames and combine them afterwards. The advantage is that if Blender crashes you only have to render from the frame after it crashed. You then combine the images and output as a video. Traditionally this is done in command line but this method is far quicker and easier. If this still crashes, then use command line with something like ffmpeg or mplayer/mencoder. To create slideshows of various photos you can do a variation of this though I prefer to use DVDSlideshow (command line plus a text file) which can do Ken Burns transitions/zoom-ins/scrolls/etc.

    • 16 Mar ’11  7:43 am by Rex Harby

      Thanks for the comment Jan

  4. 30 Aug ’11  9:30 am by Andrew

    I much prefer to export to still frames, then combine together in a video editor. Not only for the crashing reason, but also for small tweaks that need to be made. If you render a 300 frame scene that takes 8 hours and notice that 4 or 5 frames have some weird artifacts from some random model or if you decide that something is in the scene that shouldn't be, it's easy to just move it out of the way, re-render those few frames instead of the whole animation. I've also heard people say that exporting to PNG and then packing it together into an H.264 is a more lossless way of rendering a video rather than just exporting the whole animation to an .avi

  5. 3 Feb ’12  8:20 pm by Spender

    Rex Harby. Thanks for your tutorial. But i have problem. I think I follow your tutorial exact as you say in the tutorial and download in to Vimeo no problem. But Your car rotating, not mine. Why. I made my car on Blender 2.61 Cycle
    http://vimeo.com/36169854
    Thanks
    Spender

    • 4 Feb ’12  10:00 am by Rex Harby

      Did you render out loads of still renders of the car rotating before trying to convert into a video ?

  6. 4 Feb ’12  10:26 am by Spender

    Hello Rex Harby and thanks for reply.
    Yes I am sure I have rendered out my blendfile RetroCar before I import the same RetroCar.png in sequence editor. Why. In your tutorial you start delete everything on the screen. Cube/ Lamp/Camera. i did the same.
    I open up sequence editor and Add + Image RetroCar32.png.
    For years I have use AVI + H264 1280-720. (Vimeo ask for this)
    I think there is some problem with Blender 2.61 Cycle. I dont se any AVI-H264
    http://i1023.photobucket.com/albums/af353/Spender19/Skrmavbild2012-01-29kl122135.jpg
    I run on a brand new iMac Intel 10.6.8 64 bits 12GB and Blender 2.61 Cycle 64 bits. (Stable from Blender.org )
    I try to download the latest Blender version from this linc to get back AVI-H264 http://builder.blender.org/download/ but I got this message
    http://i1023.photobucket.com/albums/af353/Spender19/Skrmavbild2012-02-04kl171905.png
    Nast problem.
    Thanks
    Spender

    • 5 Feb ’12  11:36 am by Rex Harby

      I think you have miss understood this tutorial, this tutorial is to simply change alot of still renders to video format.

      Example: I open sequence editor, then add "image 1" + "image 2" + "image 3" + "..." + "image 250" then when it has finished it gives me a 250frame long video.

      I delete the cube, camera and lamp because they sometimes make Blender crash.

      Nice computer by the way ;D

  7. 5 Feb ’12  2:01 pm by Spender

    Ok Thanks Rex Harby. I think there is a bug on my Blender Cycle, because there is no 250 images line up after each other.
    Sorry.
    Spender

  8. 6 Feb ’12  1:43 am by Spender

    Rex. I have try to solve the problem, but still have not. You can take a look at my blendfile http://www.pasteall.org/blend/11455

    I rendered my RetroCar38 with this
    http://i1023.photobucket.com/albums/af353/Spender19/Skrmavbild2012-02-06kl085814.png
    You say, after open up sequencer Editor and Add image. Go to desctop and select your image. At your image (A) there is plenty of images. At my its only 1 (B) Why

    Efter finnish rendering I open up Finder and select the blendfile RetroCar28 and press Shift-Cmd-G se ( C and D1D2) I excpect to find 250 images laying her, but I got this Why???
    I doing something wrong but I dont know what.
    Thanks
    Spender

    http://i1023.photobucket.com/albums/af353/Spender19/Skrmavbild2012-02-06kl091205.jpg

    • 7 Feb ’12  5:17 am by Greg Zaal

      You seem to have rendered only one frame of the animation. Instead of clicking "Image" (same as pressing F12), click "Animation" (press Ctrl+F12) in the render tab.

  9. 13 Apr ’12  2:17 am by Zain

    Thankyou
    I have used this tutorial quite a lot. This is something which many sites tend to not mention. I truly appreciate it.
    Regards

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  14. 24 Feb ’13  8:40 pm by Rob

    I can't for the life of me figure out how to select all the images in the directory?

  15. 24 Feb ’13  8:45 pm by Rob

    Figured it out lol never mind it says to hit A I was left clicking on first image and hitting A it would deselect the image. With no images selected hit A once with any images selected hit A twice. Tks :)

  16. 18 May ’13  7:41 pm by Mike

    Can't say thanks enough. I just began using Blender to create a product demonstration video for a high tech aerospace technology we are developing. Non-pilots were having difficulty visualizing the function. So in 1 day I nearly went nuts trying to learn this software, many a youtube tutorial were seen. In the end I developed what I believe is a rather strong video just short of 550 frames. Took 34 hours to render (a process which I didn't expect), only to find out that I rendered still images. I nearly threw the computer against the wall, I was so upset. I began hitting google, but nothing seemed to be good enough (some claimed to use windows movie maker, that failed), and then I spent an hour holding a camera up to the screen to record off the display shot, which was of course less than ideal. Then I found this video. Took me 2 minutes more than the video to get it finished. I will have to owe you a beer. 1 comment though, for us brand new people I would like more reference to the keys. I didn't notice the keys highlighted on the screen so little things like select all, took me a bit to figure out. Great Job Though.

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