Exporting Vs Rendering

#1

I have been attemping to learn After Effects. I rendered out two TIFF sequences from C4D and imported them, arranged them with a dissolve, etc. So far so good. But, can anyone tell me what the difference is between Rendering and Exporting? What is the difference between selecting File>Export>Quicktime movie, and setting up a render in the render queue and hitting the render button?

Either way you end up with a Quicktime movie file that plays and looks exactly the same.

The only difference seems to be amount of complication involved. Exporting is simple, Rendering is not.

If I select File>Export>Quicktime movie, a dialog box opens called “Movie settings”. The compressor is H.264. Perfect. A simple menu allows you to change quality setting, keyframe rate, etc. Simple, click OK you’re done.

If I select Composition>Make movie and go the Render Queue route, life is not so easy. To select a format I click on Output module and from the Format menu choose Quicktime movie. Then to pick a compressor, I click on Format Options. There are nine choices plus None. The only two that would seem to apply are Animation and H.264. Since H.264 is what I want, I choose that and when I close the box I get a message that says “For reliable output with H264 choose it from the Format menu” (instead of Quicktime movie).

If you do that and then click on the Format option you get options that seem to only apply to NTSC and PAL television. If I change anything and render, I get error messages. I have rendered successfully using the Animation compressor (choosing Animation instead of H.264), but this creates a movie (the test is 16 seconds long) that’s about 14 MB as opposed to 500+ KB for the exported version with H264!

I have read the manual, it talks about rendering, says almost nothing about exporting. I watched a tutorial on Adobe’s web site on rendering, worthless. If anyone can shed any light on any of this I’d really appreicate it. Mainly, what’s the difference between rendering and exporting?

#2

After further searching through the obese manual that came with AE, I found the answer I was looking for. In a short paragraph titled “Render and export a movie using Quicktime components” on page 588 of the CS3 manual it says…

"If you have Quicktime installed, you can export a movie using components provided by Quicktime, without using the Render Queue Panel. Compositions exported using Quicktime components are rendered using the composition panels current quality and resolution settings. Only the work area is rendered.

Note: You can also export movies using the the Render Queue panel. However, some Quicktime options such as Fast Start and Hinted streaming are only available through the File>Export menu.

The specific file formats you can export to using Quicktime depend on how you’ve configured Quicktime. If you install new export modules as they become available from Apple or other parties, those modules appear in the File>Export menu in After Effects."

In case anyone’s wondering about that “Only the work area is rendered” part, it’s OK. That’s everything between the start and end points. So, for creating output intended for viewing in Quicktime, I guess I’ll be using the Export option.

#3

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