Batch Rendering BEFORE YOU START! Batch rendering is the process of rendering out multiple images. Essentially you will set up your lights and render settings, as you would with any render, to create a high quality rendered image. You will then tell Maya to render multiple images in order to render every frame of the animation. Therefore you have all of the frames rendered to a high quality. After this has been done you will turn the frames into a movie in Adobe Premiere, by playing them back at whatever FPS you animated to. BEFORE YOU START! MAKE SURE YOUR PROJECT IS SET UP! (You will find it harder to find your renders if not!) Set up all your lights and shadows. Set up your renderer and render settings to achieve the quality you desire. Produce several test renders to ensure the scene looks the way you want it to look! Check the render time and multiply this by the number of frames you have – to give you a rough estimate of how long the batch render will take.

Batch Rendering In your render settings go to the ’File Output’ section. Give is a sensible name in the File Name Prefix section. Select a image format. (PNG and Targa are nice high quality file formats.) Change Frame/Animation ext: to Name_#.ext – What this means is that you will use the name (LampJump in my case), then it will have an underscore and then it will end on a number which is the number of the frame. Frame padding is very important! Lets say your animation is 240 frames. If you put 3 for the frame padding your file names will look like: LampJump_001, LampJump_078, LampJump_232. I like to set my frame padding to one number higher than the number of digits I have. So with 240 frames I would put my frame padding to 4, one number higher than the number of digits in 240. This will then give my file names like this: LampJump_0001, LampJump_0078, LampJump_0232. This gives me a extra 0 as a buffer so that I know premiere will not get confused.

Batch Rendering Next Set your frame range – this is the length of your animation in frames. This is the number of frames your animation will render out. E.g. Start frame 1 and end frame 240 will mean it will render from frame 1 to 240. By frame set to 1 means it will render every frame. By frame set to 2 will mean it will render every other frame. Etc.

Select the camera to render with. Batch Rendering Select the camera to render with. If you don’t want an Alpha Channel (Transparency) then turn this off. If you leave it on you will only render out the models and their shadows. (Any white/black space will be transparent.

Batch Rendering Change your Maya from modelling/animation to render mode. Then go to Render > Batch Render. This will now render off screen and may take some time. DO NOT USE MAYA UNTIL IT HAS FINISHED RENDERING. Go to your project folder in windows explorer. Look in the images folder. You will find the images here.

Adobe Premiere – Assembling the Frames Create a new Project in Premiere. At this point you only really need to worry about the name of the project and where it is saving.

Adobe Premiere – Assembling the Frames Go to File > New > Sequence. Then click settings at the top of that window to get the window highlighted in red. I will explain these setting on the next slide.

Adobe Premiere – Assembling the Frames Change editing mode to ‘Custom’ this will give you full control over each setting. Timebase is whatever FPS you animated to. (24fps film, 30fps games.) Frame size should be the resolution you exported your frames at. (1080p would be 1920x1080) Pixel aspect ration should be set to ’Square Pixels (1.0)’ this will mean it is perfectly to scale. Preview file format should be whatever format you want to export as. I would use either AVI or QuickTime. Codec will let you compress the file, however, we can also compress later.

Adobe Premiere – Assembling the Frames Go to File > Import and navigate to wherever you saved your rendered frames from Maya. Select the first one – not all of them! Then select image sequence. Due to the way we set up our frames means that Premiere automatically understands that we want to import an animation. Due to the fact that our Premiere sequence settings are set up correctly it will automatically turn these frames into an animation are the correct FPS!

Adobe Premiere – Exporting a Video Go to File > Export > Media. Tick Match Sequence settings at the top. This means everything you set up in the sequence settings will be true for the export settings – which is what we want! Alternatively you can set up different export options such as – export to AVI or Quicktime and use codecs to compress. I like to use Quicktime with the H264 codec. When you are happy with your settings (You may want to have a fiddle with some of them!) Hit export at the bottom and your video will be made!

Handbrake - Compression Handbrake is a free program which will allow you to compress your video files without losing too much quality. If you don’t compress videos they may play back slowly. Websites such as Vimeo and YouTube will compress your videos in a similar way during the upload and processing processes. I always handbrake my videos!!!