[Chris Newman]

don’t feel bad. it took me a while to get used to rendering stuff the way i wanted to in cinema also.
there are three icons in the row of icons above your viewports. one looks like a glass vase, one is the same icon with a little arrow on the bottom right, the other looks like a black and white piece of paper or something with the glass vase on it. the latter is where you assign all of your render settings. click on that and you’ll have a bunch of choices on the left, each with their own options. to make this post short, i’ll deal with what i think are the most important ones just to get things rendered. go to the OUTPUT settings and choose what you want from all of the options (if you are just rendering out one frame make sure you enter that frame (frame 0 to frame 0), you can also just pick CURRENT FRAME from that little drop down menu). then go to the SAVE settings. first, choose where you want to save it to by clicking on PATH. then under format, pick the format you want it rendered to whether it’s a still image format or a movie format. for stills, i personally always render tiffs. targas seem to always render things to 72dpi regardless of what you enter in the dpi field…it compensates by making the canvas huge but keeps the still at 72 dpi. tiffs will render directly to whatever dpi you enter. if you have alpha information in your render, i recommend rendering a straight alpha. just click alpha, then straight alpha (or premultiplied if that’s what you want).
now, close that window and click and hold on the middle render icon (with the black arrow) and go to RENDER TO PICTURE VIEWER. the render progress should pop up in it’s own window and when it’s finished the file will be where ever you told it to go in you path settings. (the left render icon…the glass vase, just renders your active viewport…pretty much for reference. it doesn’t save that image anywhere outside the program.)

sorry if this was too much info. i hate it when i get responses that assume i know more than i do.

[Chris Newman]

yeah, i found those same harware recommendations. i suppose i should have read those first 😉

thanks for your help.

[Chris Newman]

yeah, i have QT pro 7.1 and high quality mode is enabled. the movie is big. it’s an HD movie trailer from apple’s site at 1080p. i just thought that the specs of my computer, which are pretty good aside from it being a single processor machine (but still 2ghz), would be good enough to play content like that smoothly.

maybe those bigger files are meant for more powerful computers.

thanks for your input