Exporting an Animation

The File, Preview command lets you see what the finished artwork looks like for a single frame, but to view the entire animation, you need to use the File, Export Animation menu command. This command opens the Export Animation dialog box shown in Figure 33.3, where you can specify the range of frames to export and specify the output format.

The available output formats include sequential images using JPEG, BMP, Targa, PNG, or PSD formats. You can also output animations to AVI for Windows, QuickTime for Macintosh or Windows, and Flash (SWF). You can learn more specifics about exporting to these various formats in the next two chapters.

Understanding the Render Quality Settings

The Export Animation dialog box includes a number of render quality options that you can enable. These options allow trade-offs between rendering at high quality or reducing quality to speed the rendering process. The render quality options include the following:

• Antialiased Edges: Applies a smoothing calculation in order to eliminate any jagged, pixilated edges.

• Apply Shape Effects: Applies any designated fill effects such as shading, gradients, and halo.

• Apply Layer Effects: Applies any layer effects to the exported animation, including shadows, blurring, and noisy strokes.

• Render at Half Dimensions: Renders the project at half the resolution that is designated in the Project Settings dialog box.

• Render at Half Frame Rate: Renders only every other frame of an animated sequence.

• Reduced Particles: Renders the project using only a fraction of the total number of particles.

• Extra-Smooth Images: Enables an additional smoothing pass on images to eliminate jagged edges.

• Use NTSC-Safe Colors: Limits the export colors to those colors that will work on a television monitor.

• Do Not Premultiply Alpha Channel: Allows the exported animation to use the existing alpha channel transparency for compositing in a video-editing package.

• Variable Line Widths: Available only when the SWF format is selected. This option allows variable line widths to be exported to SWF when enabled.