Subtitles of the Movie

When you're finished working on your composition, you're going to want to then distribute your final film to a wide variety of media. You might want this to be a Flash media player file or you might want this to be a QuickTime movie or you might want to put it on YouTube so that the world can see it on the Internet. Likewise, you might just want to watch in on your iPod or on TV. So let's talk about some of the output methods available to you. The first thing we have to do of course is to add this composition to the render queue. So let's go to composition, add to render queue and then our render queue panel appears and we can make some choices here. The first thing we want to do is just choose an output module. So I'm going to go ahead and click on where it say lossless, just open up this module setting's dialog box and I also took a screen shot of this to show you that there's more stuff down there. So we have some audio output options as well and I'll get back to this screen shot in just a moment, so for now I'll just go ahead and go back to After Effects. The first thing that we have to talk about is the format. This is how people are going to view your final file and when you click on this little list here, you see we have a lot of choices. And let's just talk about some of the options available. We have the Adobe Flash Video, which is new and very handy when you want to watch this through the Flash player. And we have the animated GIF file, which is pretty much an old-school technique where you take multiple images, then have them loop repeatedly to get an animated effect. You can also use this file to go to Blue Ray so you can have a high-def version of your film. You can also create a JPG sequence, which is handy for another application. You might want to bring this, for example, into another format for use for animation in, say, Combustion or something like that. You can also make this an MP3, an MPEG Blue Ray, a DVD, a pict or a PNG sequence, a Photoshop sequence and once again, a QuickTime movie, a tif sequence, a targa sequence and WAV file. Now, you'll notice that we have a lot of sequence options here and let me just explain why that is. Well, when you're rendering a file that has a lot of special effects and a lot of complicated animations, sometimes it's better to have things rendered as little pictures so that if your computer crashes or any part of the sequence is corrupted, you can simply re-render just the missing parts and then still have the entire sequence. For example, you may have four thousand frames of animation, but you're missing the last one hundred. Well, just re-render the last one hundred and then you'll have your entire sequence. So that is an example of some of the output options available to you as far as the form. Now let's just talk about audio very quickly. When you are dealing with audio, you have to also remember one important thing about audio. It's massive, so when you have a very high-quality setting like this 44.100 kilohertz, that's CD quality and the 16-bit means that it's going eight bits of sound in one speaker, which might be the left speaker, and eight bits of sound in the right speaker, which gives you stereo. So if you're going to go on the web, you might want to drop this down to like 14 or 22 or something even, you know, smaller and just experiment with the sound yourself and see how it, how it comes out. You don't want to go so low that the quality is horrible, but you might want to drop this down. You might also make this eight bit or in mono so it's only going through one speaker. Once again, it depends on what your output's going to be and what your intended audience is going to have. So if you're thinking that your intended audience is going to have old-fashioned modems, then you're really going to want to drop this down. But if people are going to have DSL and high-speed, then you can have a nice audio output. Just play around with that and that's something you might want to keep in mind as well. So those are going to be your output options. Just experiment with this list here and find the output option that you're going to want to use. Once again, you have to keep in mind what the intended audience is and where people are going to view this. So if they're going to watch it on DVD or Blue Ray, you know you're going to have the highest quality settings all around. If you're going to go for an animated gif or you're going to go Flash Video or something that people are going to view this on the web, you want to play around with the settings and tinker until you have something that's going to give you a nice quality but also have the ability to go through their modem in a nice fashion so they don't wait all day to watch your film. If you're going to go to another application where you want to deal with sequences for rendering, you want to choose one of the sequence options here. And that's pretty much all you have to keep in mind. Just experiment with these, find out what some of the other formats will do for you, such as the Cineon and the other ones and just go online and go to your documentation, but there are quite a few and they all have their purposes.