Export scene as a PNG/WAV sequence

- Let's say you only want to export a character with a mat around it so you can composite it in another program, like After Effects or Premiere Pro, or even Toon Boom's Harmony. Well luckily, that's easy. (uptempo music) About the only way you can export your character with a transparent background, at least, without a dynamic link, is to export sequential PNGs. So, the first thing we're going to want to do is make sure that your scene has no backgrounds in it.

And in this case, I have a background. So, let's scroll down to my background and I'm going to turn off the eyeball, turn it off. I want to make sure that this is transparent and not a black background. So every time I click on this background color here, it goes black ad white, and that checkerboard shows transparency. So I can have it black or white, which is fine, and it'll only export the character because that not a real background. That's just something that makes it easy for me to see when I'm laying out my scene. So when we export out a PNG sequence, it's going to render one PNG image, which is like a JPEG.

It's a single bitmap image, except a PNG image can hold an alpha channel, which means that the transparency behind the character will hold in that type of file. So if you're running at 24 frames a second and it's a 10 second scene, well then, you're going to have 240 frames. Now, this is a five second scene. I have it set for five seconds. And again, we want to make sure we set that up right. So, I'm going to click on the scene name and see the frame rate is set at 24 frames a second. The duration here is five seconds.

Originally, it was 25 seconds, and you could see it goes way off to the side. And, I don't want to render all of that. I just want to render what's important. It really stops at five seconds. So, when I click on the scene name, set it to five seconds, you can see the brighter area is the only portion that's going to be exported. Okay, that's great. So I'm going to go to File, Export, PNG Sequence and WAV. WAV is an audio format, so it'll export the audio at the same time as a separate file and it'll put them all together.

So, I'm going to click on that, and I want to put this into my Test PNG Export. I'm going to double-click on it, so it shows up above along the top. Yes, that's where it's going to go. And, I'm going to name this... Find Filename, Export, great. We'll call it that, and I'm going to click on Save. And, it will start exporting immediately. You see how quick it goes, and it's done. So let's open up, there we go. So, I'm going to back up to the main folder that we went to save it in.

So, it created its own folder called Export and it created an XML file within the Test PNG that I created. So, the Export.xml gives the other programs, if you want to import using the XML, all the information on where each element goes. So, let's open up the Export Folder that it created. And, here are all 122 items. Started with zero, went up to 119, so it's 120 images, so that's five seconds.

The JSON is much like an XML, they work together. This file here. And, the Export.wav is the audio file that matches up. So in the next video, we're going to cover how to import those PNG files into After Effects so that you can use them. One thing to also keep in mind is that exporting a PNG sequence, you can only export one sequence at a time. So, make sure that you've got a couple minutes. Luckily as you saw, it was fast, but this is only a five second clip of a very simple character.

So, you're not going to be able to do anything else during the export, and hopefully, it won't keep you waiting too long. (uptempo music)