How to Render and Save Your Animations as Video Files in Blender

Before you make a video file of your animation, it is a good idea to render it as an Image Sequence first. If you render it directly to a video file, you can’t stop/pause the render or there is a chance that you will get a corrupted file and have to render all of the frames all over again. Having an image sequence will allow you to experiment with different formats and settings for encoding to video.

Here are the steps:

Step 1: Render your animation into an image sequence

• Go to Blender’s Output Properties tab, then Output subtab

• Click on the folder icon to select where your rendered image sequence will be saved
• Under File Format, select PNG. If you plan to do a lot of post-production after rendering, go for OpenEXR or OpenEXR Multilayer

• Under Color, select RGB. If you want to render an animation with transparent background, select RGBA
• On Blender topmost menu, Select Render > Render Animation (or press the shortcut Ctrl + F12)

• Blender will now start rendering the scene frames one by one
• When the rendering is finished you will get numbered images according to the frame range you selected

Step 2: Convert your image sequence into video format

• To encode your rendered image sequence to video file, start a new Blender project and choose New > Video Editing

• On the Sequencer window, click on Add > Image Sequence

• Select all of the image files of your animation with A and click on “Add image strip”
• Go to Blender’s Output Properties tab, then the Output subtab. Click on the folder icon to select a folder where your video will be saved

• Under File Format, select FFmpeg
• Under Encoding > Container, select MPEG-4
• Under Video > Video Codec, select H.264
• On Blender’s top most menu Select Render > Render Animation (or press the shortcut Ctrl + F12)

• The result of this will be a video file

NB: If you are looking for a way to render transparent videos, check out ‘How to render transparent animation videos in Blender’s Cycles and Eevee render engines’