Hello youtube Mikeycal here in this video number17 (part 1) in my
series on utilizing blender as a video editor. Now, in part 1, I'm gonna show you
guys how you can take your blender video project and render it out to a common
media file format like "mpeg4" and in part 2 we're going to talk about
advanced encoding. I'm going to show you guys how you can shrink the file sizes
down and maintain a lot of the visual and audio quality. so let's get started
by going over to our properties window, over here. At the top of this window we
have these tabs and this is where we have different settings for different
parts of Blender. But the two tabs that are going to the most important to use
today are going to be the "render" tab, which is the tab with the camera, and the
third tab over... the "scene" tab. But let's first start in the render tab and start
configuring some optimal settings. So let's go to the display section and we
want to switch the display option here to "Keep UI", and what that's going to
do is, it will render the video in the background when we click the animation button.
instead of displaying it to the screen, which is what the other options will do.
Next, we want to go down to our "Dimension" section, and if you know what the
dimensions of your video are, you can select them from these presets or you
can type them in. One of the easiest ways to get the correct resolution is to
right-click on your video strip, go to the strip menu, and select Set
Render Size. it will automatically take whatever resolution that video is, and
put it into the resolution settings here. Very easy to do. Next, we want to make
sure that we have our frame range set correctly. You want to start at frame 1
and wherever your video ends, you want to set your end frame. And just remember
that the renderer will render out whatever is between the start frame and
end frame, so, in the sequencer we see these black lines at the beginning and
ending. And you can see that my video is completely inside of those lines - within
a frame range.
So, just make sure that you set it to be the complete video that you want to
render out. The next thing we need to do is make sure that our frame rate is set
correctly. In a previous video I told you some ways that you can do that... You can look at
these two numbers, for example, right here. You can't do this in every video because
often you'll have your strips cut up, and they'll report all kinds of different
numbers. But in this case, we only have one video inputed into a sequencer, and I
can see that it's the correct frame rate because these two frame numbers are
identical. But, just verify it by playing it back and seeing if everything is in
synchronization with audio. So, the next thing that we want to do is we want to
go to the "Output" section. And the output section is the place where we're going
to set the folder that we want our mpeg4 to render to. So you can click on this little
folder icon here and you can select whatever folder, on your computer, that you
want and hit the "Accept" button. And it will now
output to that folder whenever you click the animation button. Next, we want
to go down to this
drop down, right here, it's set to PNG by default. You want to convert it to a
movie format. And a movie format that we're going to convert it too today is H. 264
Now, the next option is, do we want it to be black and white or do we want to be
color. We typically want our videos to be color, so select the "RGB" option. And then
we're gonna go to the "Encoding" section, and in the encoding section the most
important option you need to set is the codec. We want to make sure that it is
set at "H.264" and you can actually use "AVI", you can use "mpeg4" you can use
"QuickTime" and you can use "Matroska". They're just gonna give you different
containers. some Matroska is gonna give you an MKV (.MKV) file. A QuickTime
give you a (.mov), AVI is gonna be (.AVI) and MPEG4 is going
to be (.mp4). Now there are differences between the different
formats, but they're not really relevant for what we're doing today
basically the container of Matroska can contain different metadata like closed
captions and stuff like that... there's different features of different file format
containers, but realistically today we just need to use mpeg4. That will
make an H.264 video that is inside of an (.MP4) extension/container. So, the
next think we wanna do is, we want to set up a bitrate. Now this is a little bit
complicated because depending on the motion in your video, you're going to
need different bitrate settings. The higher the bitrate is, the more quality
we're gonna have, but the bigger the file size. Now the thing about Blender is that
it maxes out at 10,000 kilobits per second and we can't go any higher and in
the next video in the talk about how we can get around this using lossless
options. But today we just want to render everything out from blender and if it's
good enough then we're fine. If it's not then we'll go to the next video will
figure out how to do it. So what you guys really want to do is I would say
set a short frame range in her video. So, for example, if I know that
there's a really complicated part of my video that has lots of motion, I want to
kind of center around those frames. I would click my mouse over the sequence,
placing the Green Line, hover my mouse cursor over my timeline and hit the
S button to set a start frame. And you'll notice, when I do that, it actually sets
to start frame to be 995. It's the location that I clicked it at, and then do a very
shorts frame range, and hold your mouse over the timeline again, hit E. So all I
did was I used a shortcut to set the frame range by holding my mouse over the
timeline and hitting the S button for starts frame and E button for End frame. And that's
sets a short frame range, that we can render out and see what it looks like
using the setting that we have configured - the bitrate.
So, I've set the frame range down here but before we do any kind of rendering out
to test the frame rate to see if its quality enough. Let's go over to the GOP
setting, the "GOP size". Now, GOP is the "group of pictures" and it's a little too
complicated for me to go into the details of it but it has to do with how
the images are arranged in the file. And typically places like YouTube will tell
you to set it to half of your framerate. So, the frame rate for this video is 24
frames per seconds. So i'm gona Set
GOP size to 12. And you guys can leave the "rate" settings and the "mux" settings
alone the default should work fine. Now, the next thing we need to do is set our audio
codec because by default blender has audio turned off. So we want to use "AAC"
because this is the highest quality audio that we can output to our file
that is compressed. We can always go to PCM which is uncompressed or FLAC and
those will give us higher quality but they're much bigger file size. So you can
use 192. The maximum bit rate for AAC is 384. Now, if you are having a hard time
with AAC you can also render out to mp3 and it has the same exact bitrate maximum
of 384. But typically you want to be 160 or higher when using AAC or using mp3
setting. Now, there's only one more thing that we might want to change. And this is
going to depend on if you're a person who's doing high quality audio or not. By
default, blender uses an audio sample rate of 44.1 kHz. But, I actually
record my audio on my camera at 48kHz and some people record
their audio at 96kHz but, by default, blender will convert it to a
44.1kHz sample rate and this could be a problem for
some people. So I'm gonna show you guys how you can actually change the sample
rate by going up to the
scene tab. And, in the scene tab, we have a section called "Audio" and in there we can
set the sample rate that we desire to use. And I want to use a sample rate of
48kHz. So I'm just going to switch this to 48kHz and you can make it 96kHz
there or just leave it as it is. Hit my ENTER button and I can actually switch to to
5.1 surround as well or some other options but I have recorded myself in
stereo some believe it that way. So now we're ready to test out our render. And
all we need to do is click the "Animation" button and what it's going to do is it's
going to render this short frame range. remember I told you in the beginning of the video, it only
renders out, when you click the animation button, the frame range that you have set
So, we're doing this just to test it. So I'm going to click my animation button and i'll
be right back.
OK, So I brought the video up... this is the small frame range that we rendered out and
play it back on repeat to see what the quality looks like. It looks really
really good, of course, I used the highest bitrate setting of 10,000 kilobits per second
What I would do now, typically, is I would reduce it maybe by a 1000kb/s at
a time and see how it affects the quality. As I said earlier, the lower
the bitrate the smaller file size. So we want to try to find that perfect file size
quality ratio. So, just go back to the settings and lower it a 1000kb/s at a time,
and render out that small frame range. And when you found a bitrate setting that you
like, just remember to set the frame range to encapsulate the entire video. I
can do that really quickly, actually, by using my "page up" and "page down" buttons.
Holding my mouse cursor over the sequencer and, if I hit "page up" or "page down",
you notice it jumps to the cuts on each side. So, if I go here I can highlight my mouse
over the timeline and it S, for start frame, and I hit my "page up" button,
hold mouse over the timeline again, and hit E for end frame, and now you look up here and I'll
see you start frame is 1 - 2794. Which is the entire video. The black lines are
encapsulating the entire video. So, we would hit the "animation" button and it
would render this out, and we're done. Now, if you guys are still not pleased
with the quality or the file size, make sure that you check out my next video -
part 2, where I show you guys how you can do advanced encoding by outputting the video
from here, at the highest quality possible, and then encoding it using a
program like "Handbrake". I'll see you guys next video.