Once you have your effect looking the way you want it, you can render it and output it to a variety of different image formats using a File Output operator. If you are using a distributed rendering setup, Softimage renders Fx sequences using the number of render slave CPUs specified in the compositing preferences (see Setting Compositing Preferences).
By default, output images and sequences are stored in the Composites folder, located in your project's root folder. The Composites folder does not exist when you first create your project: it is created the first time that you insert a File Output operator in the FxTree.
From the FxTree menu, choose Operators 
Image File Output. A File Output node is inserted in the FxTree. Connect the output of the last operator in your operator network to the File
Output operator's input.
Use the operator selector to pre-connect a File Output operator to the last operator in your operator network and insert it in the FxTree.
Double-click the File Output operator to preview it in any open Fx Viewers and open its property editor.
From the File Output tab of the File Output property editor, do the following:
Enter a file name, and destination path in the File Name text box. You can build the filename using Tokens and Templates [Properties Reference].
If the specified file format allows you to specify a codec for compression, click the Codec button. This opens the Video Compression dialog box from which you can select a codec and configure the related options.
Set the start frame, end frame, and step of the effect sequence that you want to output.
If you want to output a still image, set each of these values to 1.
If desired, you can also change the Result Frame Number Offset value.
This offsets the frame numbers of the output sequence by the specified number of frames, allowing you to output sequences whose frame numbering begins at values other than 1.
On the Format Options tab of the File Output property editor, you can change the Pixel Ratio and Frame Rate of the output sequence.
Each of these parameters has a set of preset buttons that you can click to quickly set the correct pixel ratio for several common picture standards, and common frame rates respectively.
If the effect that you're rendering uses Cineon images that were converted to linear color space when you imported them, you can activate the Automatic Linear to Log for Cineon option to convert back to logartihmic color space at render time.
If the effect includes an alpha channel that you wish to render make sure to activate the Write Alpha option as well.
The rendering progress window is displayed. As your effect renders, its progress is indicated by a progress bar. You can also see useful information like the average rendering time for each frame.
When the sequence is finished rendering, you can click the Launch Flipbook button to launch a flipbook that automatically plays back the rendered sequence.
Rendering Effects From the Command Line
You can also render effects non-interactively from the command line using xsi -script or xsibatch -script. Make sure that your script contains the following line (VBScript example):
RenderFxOp "OutputOperator", False
where OutputOperator is the name of the FileOutput operator that you want to render. The False statement specifies that the Fx Rendering dialog box should not be displayed during rendering.
This is the same command that is used by Softimage when you render an effect interactively and it appears in the command log whenever you click the Render button in the Fx Rendering dialog box.
Of course, when you render interactively, the flag is set to True and the dialog box is displayed during rendering.
