Rendering animations

Note: You need Ultra Fractal 

Animation Edition

 to render animations.

To create a final version of a fractal 

animation

, you have to render it to disk. This works the same as 

rendering images

, except that the Render to Disk dialog shows additional options that are specific to 

animations.

  To render the animation in an open 

fractal window

 to disk, click Render to Disk on the 

Fractal menu.

The Render to Disk dialog opens. Here, you can specify a file and 

file format

 for the animation. You 

can either render the animation to an AVI movie, or to a sequence of bitmap images in any format. 

It is recommended to render to a sequence of images for final renders. When you later want to 

compress these to a single movie (for example in MPEG format) with programs such as 

VirtualDub

, it 

is much less time consuming to experiment with different compression settings.

Apart from the regular settings such as the desired size and resolution and the 

anti aliasing

 settings, 

the dialog also provides specific settings for animations. You can select which frames you want to 

render: the entire animation, the current frame, or a consecutive range of frames. When you are 

rendering to a sequence of images, you can optionally offset the frame number of the generated 

images. This is useful if you are dividing a long animation into several parts that are rendered 

individually. To get help on a control, click the ? button in the title bar, and then click the control.

You can also apply motion blur to the rendered animation. The motion blur feature examines the 

amount of movement in each frame and blurs it accordingly, like a film camera would. This makes 

the movement in animations more natural and convincing.

Click OK to start rendering the animation. This will create a new render job that starts calculating the 

image in the background. Render jobs can be monitored and managed in the Render to Disk tool 

window. See 

Render jobs

.

Notes

G     

It is recommended to use both anti aliasing and motion blur when rendering animations to 

reduce the amount of jumping and flickering pixels.

G     

Motion blur is calculated directly from the coordinate movement that occurs when the fractal 

is zoomed or rotated, and therefore it is efficient to calculate and fairly accurate. The 

downside is that it only works with zooming, panning, rotating, and so on, and not with 

movements that are the result of changes to other parameters.

G     

Motion blur needs extra memory and temporary disk space, and because of this there is a 

limit to the maximum size of the image that does not normally apply to disk rendering. For 

example, a 1024x768 image takes 24 MB and a 4096x4096 image takes 512 MB of RAM.

Next: 

Rendering parameter files

See Also

Animation

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