Exporting your animations requires you to make a few important decisions. At last, you are ready to export your animation from character animator. Three things to think about first, number one, the duration. Number two, the background. And number three, what kind of file do you want to export? Okay, so let's start with that duration. 

Unfortunately, it is quite possible that you could export more than you intended. You might have a ridiculously long animation that you don't realize is going to get exported, and you might have just a lot of still video. So to make sure that you get only what you intended, you can use this lighter gray area here. This is the work area bar, and you can essentially bracket over your intended animation. So if I shorten it, let's say a lot and right click, I have an option here to trim the scene to the work area. This will assure that only my intended animation that is bracketed within the work area is exported. So that's the first thing I would recommend. 

Secondly, you're going to want to decide if you want a transparent background or if you want a solid colored background. The reason is that even though I see white here as a background, if I were to go to File and Export and let's say video, I surprisingly would not get a white background, it would be black. So this white background is only inside of character animator. So you have to decide, do I want a transparent background or if I'm intending to have a white background, I would need to bring in a white background. 

So in this case, if I did want to do that, I could go to File and Import. And in the project files, I've got a light gray background that I could simply drag and drop underneath my animation. And you can see it's a little bit of a lighter gray just so we could see the difference. Right, if I turn it on and off, yeah. And that would assure that I have the colored background that I want. 

Okay, lastly, the file format. You have a ton of options if I cruise up to File and export, starting from the top, a video via Media encoder. So Media encoder is an app dedicated to compression and different video file formats. And this would be a great way to go in the event that you wanted a solid colored background that we've got here in character animator. 

Moving on down. If I needed an alpha channel, I would need to go and delete my background then, and that would allow me to have a transparent background for Rob here in case I wanted to maybe overlay him on some other background in another app. alright, a png sequence would give you the highest quality of video. It's actually going to be a sequence of png files that is a lot less compression format and a separate wave file. So this is the highest quality, but it does require a little bit more work because you bring in the sequence and the wave files separately. 

Let's say in Adobe after effects we've talked about adobe dynamic link. Now we've got frame. Okay. It's quite possible that you needed this particular pose for a social media profile picture. Great. And that would give me a single png file. All right, but going back to kind of our standard practice here, I'm going to hit Command Z, which is control z on a PC, just to bring my background back. 

And let's do a video via Adobe Media encoder. It's a pretty standard way to go. When I do that, it's going to want to name the file. I can call it scene. Rob It's going to launch Adobe Media encoder. And you can see that by default, I have the H 264 compression standard that's going to create an mp4 file, and that is the standard video compression format used by every social media channel presently. 

Lastly, I have different presets, including presets for things like Twitter, Facebook, vimeo, anything you might want. Okay, so all I have to do now if I'm happy with all of those settings, is make sure it's sending it to the right location and hit the shiny green button and off it goes. And now on my desktop, I have an mp4 file that I can send and post and use anywhere I want.