Playblast animation

Before you playblast, be aware of the following issues and known limitations:

• Playblasting depends upon your system movie libraries to generate the selected compression scheme. Autodesk cannot guarantee the reliability or success of all codecs available to your operating system. See Codec support for additional information. For QuickTime^®, ensure that you have properly installed the most recent version.
• When playblasting an animation, ensure the Render offscreen option is turned on in the Playblast Options, or make sure that the area you want to playblast is not obscured by any windows.

  If an open window obscures the area where the screen will be grabbed, the first frame of your movie will display part of the window. This can also occur when a screensaver appears partway through playblasting a long animation.

• Playblast uses the $TEMP directory on Windows even if Save To File specifies a different directory. Make sure there is enough disk space to hold the playblast file in your $TEMP directory.
• Once your playblasted animation displays in a viewer window, you must close the viewer if you want to playblast the scene again. Maya cannot playblast the same scene again if the movie is still displayed in the viewer.
• The playback time of Playblast may be severely delayed in scenes with large imported .aiff audio files. For example, a 40MB .aiff file may cause a 20+ second delay between the initial command call and playback. As a workaround, view and play all (as long as your audio clips do not overlap) your loaded audio files from the Trax Editor or use multiple short audio files rather than single large audio files.

To playblast an animation

1. Create or open an animation.
2. Select Window > Playblast > to open the Playblast Options.
3. Select the Format for the playblast output.

   The Encoding drop-down updates automatically with associated codecs.

   TipTo create an image sequence instead of a movie, set Format to image, then select an image format in the Encoding drop-down list.
4. (Optional) Select the codec or image format you want to use from the Encoding drop-down list.
   TipSet Encoding to global to use the same format you have specified in the Render Settings: Common tab.
5. Set the compression Quality value you want.
6. Set Display Size to From Window.
7. Click in a view to make it active.
8. Click Playblast.

   The scene plays in the active view for the playback range in the Time Slider. After each time frame is drawn, Maya takes a screen grab of the active view.

   Depending on your platform and which output Format you selected, a new window opens and previews the playblasted animation.

   Tip

   If you set a sound file (or files) to display in the Time Slider while Playblast is running, and you select a movie file type as the output Format, the sounds are included in the resulting saved movie file. See Display audio on the Time Slider.

To output single frames of your animation to Playblast

1. Use the -frame flag with the playblast MEL command.

   For example:

   playblast -frame 1 -frame 4 -frame 7

   outputs frames 1, 4, and 7 of your current animation to Playblast.

For more information, see Help > MEL Command Reference.

To cancel a playblast

1. Press the key.

To run Playblast when Maya is minimized on your screen

1. Use the -os/offScreen flag with the playblast MEL command.

For more information, see Help > MEL Command Reference.

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