Originally posted by Keeper:

when i try to export in avi, the only mode i can export in, -

AVI exports are uncompressed and fill much more than they should, often up to four gigabytes. If it reaches those four gigabytes, Source Filmmaker can't export the rest of the video, meaning that the video file is incomplete and corrupted. If it doesn't reach four gigabytes, it still fills more than it should.

MP4/MOV exports require QuickTime, which is a security risk for Windows.[www.us-cert.gov] Even if they didn't, they'd still be too dark and saturated or too bright and desaturated (depending on compression codec), along with compression artefacts, so they still wouldn't be good options.

(It's okay to export AVI/MP4/MOV videos from other programs; only Source Filmmaker has these bad AVI/MP4/MOV implementations.)




On the other hand, image sequences export individual images and a sound file, and then it's up to you to combine them into a video yourself. There are a few different image formats, but I prefer/recommend PNG as it's a widely-supported, losslessly-compressed format (while JPEG is lossy-compressed).

As the images are exported individually, you don't have to render/export everything at once (like with a single video file). You can render half of a session at one time, and the other half another time.
This also means that if you change something in the session, you only have to re-render the part that you changed, rather than the entire session.
(I suggest selecting shots in the Clip Editor and setting the export duration to "Selected Shots" rather than a range of seconds, as some visual effects look wrong if you start rendering mid-shot.)


After exporting an image sequence and sound from Source Filmmaker, you have to open them in a video editor, set the frame rate correctly (e.g. 24 frames per second if that's the session frame rate), and export it as a video with whichever format and compression settings you want.
Almost any video editor will work, except for Windows Live Movie Maker as it can't use an accurate frame rate.

You can then experiment with different video formats and compression settings, to find a good balance of high quality and low file size. As you don't have to re-render all of the images (as they're already image files), you can experiment much faster than if you had to re-render the whole video from Source Filmmaker each time.

Originally posted by Keeper:

- it doesn't show the file that exported, how do i fix this problem

I don't know why that happens, but using an image sequence instead might indirectly fix it.