You have just created a nice logo intro or effect in Blender. Now you want to render the animation video with a transparent background so that you can place it on top of your videos. In this post, you are going to learn how to render transparent background animation videos in Blender. This method works for both Cycles and Eevee render engines.
Settings for rendering a transparent animation video in Blender Cycles and Eevee render engines
- After you have finished working on your project, under the ‘Properties’ panel, go to Render Properties > Film tab.
- Check the ‘Transparent’ checkbox to enable transparency. Product Rendering Tools add-on has this and many other features to make this easier for you.
- Jump to ‘Output Properties’ and go straight down to the ‘Output’ tab
- Under the ‘File Format’ dropdown, select ‘FFmpeg Video’
- Open ‘Encoding’ settings, under the ‘Container’ dropdown, select ‘Quicktime’
- On ‘Video’ settings, under the ‘Video Codec’ dropdown, select ‘QT rle / QT Animation’
- Still, under the ‘Output’ tab, go back to ‘Color’ below ‘File Format’ and click ‘RGBA’
- On Blender’s top bar, click ‘Render’, on the dropdown click ‘Render Animation’
- And you are done. Your rendered animation video is transparent
N.B: If you are looking for a way to render images with transparent backgrounds, check out ‘How to render transparent PNG images in Blender’s Cycles and Eevee render engines‘
This works great, but QT-rle, aside from animation stuff, can produce absolutely massive file sizes. It uses “Run Length Encoding” (RLE), which relies on consistent color patches across swaths of each row; that’s great for some things, but terrible for anything with major HSL variation in it. (I’ve seen 45 second clips reach six gigabytes in size… bigger than most machines can play without frequently pausing to buffer.) You might mention using image strips of PNG or JPEG2000, both of which also contain an alpha channel, optionally, and have much more reliable compression.
Thanks for the update, Michael.