Video Export

Boxshot renders all animations (turntable, transition and oscillation) as a sequence of images — one image per frame — instead of a single video file. This is a deliberate design decision, and this tutorial explains the reasons behind it and shows how to turn the rendered frames into a video.

Why Frame Sequences?

Video encoding is a separate area with its own settings, codecs and options. If Boxshot exported videos directly, you would have to deal with video codecs, bitrates, frame rates and containers right in the rendering dialog. On top of that, video formats are lossy: every re-encode degrades the image quality.

Images, on the other hand, are lossless. A frame sequence keeps every pixel of the rendered animation intact, so you can:

• convert the frames to any video format, resolution or frame rate you need;
• export the video any number of times with different settings without losing quality;
• reuse the frames for other purposes, like VR objects or web animations.

That’s why Boxshot exports frame sequences and leaves video encoding to dedicated tools.

Converting Frames to Video

To turn the rendered frames into a video, import the image sequence into a video editor of your choice and export it as a video. Most editors recognize a sequence of numbered images and import it as a single clip automatically.

Here are some free video editors you can use. Most of them work on both macOS and Windows:

• DaVinci Resolve — professional free editor with advanced color grading;
• Shotcut — free and open-source editor;
• OpenShot — basic open-source editor;
• VLC — media player that can also convert image sequences to video.

On macOS you can also use iMovie, which is free and comes with the operating system.

More Batch Rendering Tutorials

• Turntable Animation — render fly–around animations;
• Transition Animation — render transition from one snapshot to another;
• Oscillation Animation — render camera oscillation animations;
• Video Export — turn rendered frame sequences into videos;
• Rendering Snapshots — render all snapshots in the scene;
• Batch Rendering — render the same scene with multiple artwork;
• Command Line Rendering — render projects from command line;
• Job Files — make and render batch jobs with code.