[MUSIC PLAYING] So I just want to talk a little bit about my workflow before we go ahead and export this video. I just made three sequences, one for each verse, and then I created a new timeline called Main Sequence. And you can see that I edited together these nested sequences, right? So here's my first verse sequence, second verse sequence with the audio, and third verse sequence.

So this is always a very helpful thing to do. And we've talked about it before where you do a bunch of work, and then you collapse it all into one timeline or nest or folder, or whatever. And then you take that collapsed work and you go up one level to edit that together with other collapsed pieces of work, right?

So if you were to pop open any of these sequences, you would be able to jump in and edit them and move them around. And then your main sequence on the very top of the pyramid would automatically update.

And now it's time to export this video. In other programs, we would simply go under File, Export Project, or Export whatever, and it would go ahead and build our finished media. But for video, it's different. So we're going to talk a little bit about how video is different from other forms of media. It's not just a simple save as a different file type.

What we've got to do is we've got to render this video. And rendering means that the program crawls through the timeline frame by frame, and it assembles all of the effects. It assembles all of the audio. It assembles all of the video, every transition that you've done.

And then what it does is it creates a sequence of frames with associated audio, and it smushes them all together into one video. You can't edit that video as easily anymore. It's kind of a finished product. Everything's sort of collapsed together. But that video can be played on every computer that's got the internet all over the world. So that's what we're going to try to do.

To do that, we're going to go to this very last tab here on the bottom, the one with the rocket ship. Deliver. Let's go there. And we still have our timeline here on the bottom, but we're not really going to be editing here. What we're going to just be doing is we're going to be outputting. And you can preview what each part might look like. But by this point, you should be pretty much done with your main editing. We're just going to output it.

So the first thing we want to do is come up with a name. I'm just going to call this Travel by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and maybe a little bit of information about the type of file it is. I'm going to say 1,280 by 720. That's the resolution that we're going to be using.

So a renderer doesn't only output the video. It also compresses it. And we've talked about compression before. Compression is throwing away information to make files smaller. And there's lots of different ways to throw away information for lots of different purposes, so you might have to experiment with some of these. But I just kind of want to give you an overview of how this kind of works.

There's different formats for videos. So a lot of the videos that you're going to see are MP4s. Those are on YouTube and stuff. AVI is a very common video format that's been around forever, and it's very high quality. Of course, you've always got QuickTime, which is the Apple format, which is also very good for animation and alpha channels. So all kinds of different formats here.

We're going to choose MP4. This is a very, very common format. It's very easy to view on every browser that's out there right now. So it's probably a good idea for you to select MP4 unless your school or your teacher has a specific requirement that makes MP4 not work.

So the codec is the program that decides exactly how to compress the information. Codec kind of smooshes together the words coder and decoder together, and that's how we get codec. And it's a good way to think about it because what it does is it codes all the information. And then when you go to watch it, it helps you decode the information.

If you were to try to use an uncompressed video and try to share that with somebody full quality, it could be many, many gigs. It could be a terabyte. It could be so big you could never send it over email, or it would take days for them to download it. So to make the video portable, to make it mobile, to make it easy to watch on a lot of different screens and a lot of different computers and devices all over the world, we've got to throw away a lot of this information, and we're going to use a codec to do it.

One of the more common codecs is H.264. There's a lot of other ones, but for MP4 the codec is almost always H.264. And this is one that you're going to see all over the place. In fact, it's our first preset here.

You can notice there's a number of presets along the top for different applications. And H.264 has kind of become a standard because it looks really nice and it doesn't throw away a lot of information, but it's also very portable and it makes nice, small videos. So I'm going to go ahead and recommend H.264 in an MP4 format for this project.

Now, the next thing is the resolution. And we know about resolution. We've talked about this before with our raster imaging unit. And basically, it's how many pixels across it is by how many pixels high it is.

Many modern TVs are 1,920 by 1,080. A lot of computer monitors are. We're starting to see a lot of TVs that are now 4K, which are even higher quality, ultra HD. And you can-- 3,840. Those are really, really high.

For our purposes, we're probably not going to need to go that high. This is not going to be broadcast or anything like that. So let's stick with 1,280 by 720 for this one. That's a really nice resolution, but it's small enough that it's very portable.

Frame rate is also something you should consider. This is how many frames happen per second. So in this default setting, you're going to have 24 frames for every second of footage. And that's what you're going to see in a lot of different applications. 24 is a pretty standard frame rate. In fact, most movies are in 24 frames per second. Many video cameras default to 24 frames per second.

And you get different kind of effects if you boost up the frame rate or if you lower it. If you lower your frame rate too much, it's going to look very stuttery. For example, if you have only 10 frames per second, each frame has to stay on screen for a little bit longer, so your animation or your movements are going to look a little bit more jerky.

If you have 60 frames per second, it looks almost like it's magical. I mean, it's so smooth and you see so much information that it looks a little bit strange. And there's been some controversy about some directors who have chosen to shoot films in 60 frames a second, and then they kind of have this strange look to them. So that's kind of a production choice.

We're going to go ahead and stick to 24 frames per second. And the rest of these settings we can keep as defaults. There's a lot of advanced stuff that you can get into here, and we're not going to worry about those. Most of these default settings are just fine.

So now that we've got our video set, let's go ahead and look at our audio. And there's a different kind of codec for audio, just like there's codecs for video. And this is the Apple codec, AAC. Very, very common one. And we can keep these settings default. This is going to be fine. Our file. This is going to be fine.

So now that we've figured out how we're going to export this, let's just go ahead and do it. What we need to do is we need to add this to our render queue. And I've already got one here. I'm just going to go ahead and delete that.

This is our render queue. And a queue is just kind of like a lineup for your workflow of where all of your projects that are needing to be rendered sit and wait. So our next step is to add this project to the render queue, and that will take a second.

An a queue is really useful. If you do a lot of video production, you might set a lot of stuff up in a queue and then hit Render so that your computer can work overnight. You wake up in the morning and all your videos are done. And also in big production facilities, they have different computers like servers that are just designed to render.

So you might send your finished file to the render queue of the server, and then it's always constantly scanning that folder. And as soon as it sees something in there, it renders it.

So first, you kind of set it up to render, and then you go ahead and render it. And that's what the queue is. The queue is like-- it's kind of a waiting area or a staging area for all of your projects that need to come out.

Right now, we only have one thing in our queue. But if you had a bunch of projects that you wanted to do, or if you had to render a bunch of things, you could line them all up in the queue, hit Start Render, walk away, and when you come back, all of your files will be ready to upload.

I'm going to go ahead and hit Start Render here. And now you can kind of see a little preview of what's happening. So you can see that the program is crawling along the timeline and it's putting together all of these pieces of data. It's compressing them. It's putting them in a format that everybody can read, the H.264. It's rendering out all of our transitions, so some of these overlays and stuff. It's putting them all together, and it's just kind of drawing each piece, rendering it all out, and making it ready to go.

So this computer's not the fastest in the world, but it's fast enough that this is not taking super long. If your video is really complicated and you have a lot of different parts to it, it might take a long time, or if your computer's kind of old. If your computer's really fast or your video's really simple, it might not take that long at all. So this is done.

And so now we have our file that is ready to upload. And it's always a good idea before you upload your file to take one more look at it, make sure that the audio sounds right. Make sure that the render came out OK. Make sure that the file size isn't too big.

But now you have an MP4 file that is ready to either send to your teacher, or you could post it online on many different video hosts, social media platforms, or whatever else. It's ready to share. It's ready to go.