How to Render and Format Digital Video

Video rendering can often be the most challenging aspect of the video production process. None of your digital mojo will matter if the video doesn't play back smoothly. Rendering involves choosing the final video size, playback speed and compression. Most current software makes the process easier by choosing the best format for you, but you still need to know the process.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Hard drive with the capacity to store video files
• At least 1 GB of RAM, 4 GB preferred

1. Make sure every video element is queued. Review the video software timeline to check the location of titles, clips, transitions and effects.

2. Preview the playback. Your software will allow you to play your movie, or even selected scenes from your movie, in a smaller window. Look for any glitches: transition miscues, audio that's slightly out of synch, titles out of alignment and so forth.

3. Choose your video rendering format. This will depend on whether you intend to render the movie for iPod, to DVD, to camera or for playback on the Web. Each format requires a different CODEC (video compression format). Video rendered for DVD won't play back on the Web. Most current software allows you to choose the media rather than the CODEC.

4. Render the movie. Feel free to tweak the compression settings and render your video (or sections of your video) more than once to see what settings will give you the best combination of quality and playback. More compression increases playback speed but decreases image and sound quality. Less compression makes the image pop but slows the playback or causes it to skip.

Tips & Warnings

• Try to keep image complexity to a minimum. The more effects, filters, overlays and audio channels you employ, the more resources your software will require from RAM, hard drive and your CPU.
• Max out your RAM. The amount of available RAM boosts rendering and playback performance.
• If you haven't bought your video workstation yet, pay the extra to get the model with maximum bus speed. Processor speed isn't nearly as critical as data throughput.