Rendering and
File Formats
Rendering is
the last step of editing a movie or a radio programme. It converts your
project into one video clip or one audio clip, putting together all
sources, effects, transitions and all their properties as you designed.
When your movie is complete, you will want
to show it to your friends and family. To do this you must render it. Rendering
is a process which creates a finished film or programme from your project. Many
people find this a difficult concept.
Assets are stored in folders in the Video
and Clips Stage or the Music and Sounds Stage. Movies that you are editing are
saved as projects. Rendering creates a finished movie that can be emailed, put
on Websites, or DVDs, and projected onto large screens. You will still keep all
of your assets so you can re-edit and re-render the movie as often as you like.
Click on the ‘Render’ button on the
Toolbar.
You will see the Render Stage.
Before you can
start rendering some parameters must be set. This can be carried out in the
Rendering dialogue box, which is shown in the stage area after selecting the
Rendering stage.
Choose a file format. Revelation Sight and
Sound will automatically set the optimum size, frame rate and compression based
on the quality of your assets but you can change these if you wish. Press the ‘Render
button’, give your work a filename, and save your movie.
In general, you
have to select the output format by using the buttons at the top, then select
the video resolution (if the file contains any video) and compression quality
and finally click on the Render button.
However,
several of these steps may be omitted because all the settings are pre-set to
reasonable defaults. So a user who does not want to know much about output
formats, qualities and bitrates can just click on the Render button and
Revelation Sight and Sound will create a reasonable quality output file.
Note: Medium video size and medium frame -
rate are best for most projects as these make small files and are quick to
render.
Choosing a
file format
Picture and
Sound:
(Windows Media Video). Use this for films that will be shown on
PC computers.
This is the best format. It has a very small
file size, is high quality and can be viewed on all modern equipment including
many video phones.
This format is uncompressed. It means you can
edit your assets many times without losing quality by compressing the file.
File sizes are huge so you will need a big hard disk and a very fast computer
to use this option.
This is the old standard format for PCs. File
sizes are large, and quality is worse than WMV or MP4.
As AVI but compressed for a smaller file size.
You may experience some loss of quality. Don’t use this unless you understand
what you are doing.
Sound only:
(Windows Media Audio). Use this for sound that will
be heard on PC computers or made into Music CDs to play on home stereo
equipment.
A very popular format for sound and music
files.
Can be played on portable MP3 players.
Streaming:
This is the process by which multimedia
files can be shared on websites.
The file starts to play without waiting
for the download to finish.
WMV and
MP4 contain sounds and pictures, WMA contains sound only.
