What Does Rendered Video Mean? Definition & Guide for 2025

Video production doesn’t finish when you edit the final frame. To make it viewable you need to render it, but what does rendered video mean? We’ll let you know the meaning of rendered video, how to do it, and some popular video rendering software that you could use.

Understanding Rendered Video: Meaning

What Does Rendered Video Mean?

At its core, rendered video is the process of converting raw or layered video footage or computer-generated images into a final, playable video format. Think of it as the last step in the video production pipeline! The idea is to create a video file that can be easily viewed on various devices without any hitches.

When you're filming on your camera, or creating a 3D animation in software like Blender, the resulting footage or frames are typically in a raw format that's not suitable for direct playback. This is where video rendering comes in. It sort of flattens all the raw bits – video, audio, effects, text etc - into a playable video that can be watched by your audience.

Video Rendering Explained: What Does Rendering a Video Mean?

We’ve learned that video rendering is when your device takes all the components of your video project and compiles them into a single video file in a standardised format, like MP4 or AVI, for example, but you might not know exactly what that involves.

During the rendering process, your computer is doing a lot of different stuff, like:

Processing Frames: If you're dealing with animation or video effects, each frame might need extra processing or ‘thinking time’ to get it to a great visual standard.
Audio Mixing: If your video has audio, the rendering software will mix and sync it with the video.
Compression: Videos can be fairly big files, especially those in high-quality formats. Rendering often needs to include compression to reduce the file size while keeping that all important video quality.
Exporting: Once all your elements are processed and flattened, the software exports a finished video file to your specified destination.

The Technical… Stuff

You know what rendering is and why you need to do it, but it’s probably helpful to understand some of the other technical bits and pieces that link into rendered video.

Video Resolution

Resolution is the fancy term for the number of pixels that make up each frame of your video. Common resolutions include 720p (HD), 1080p (Full HD), and 4K (3840x2160 pixels). Higher resolutions generally mean sharper and more detailed videos, plus you get a lot of wiggle room with your editing the better quality it is, but they also require more processing power and storage space. It’s a question of balance.

Frame Rate

Frame rate is measured in frames per second (fps) and determines how smoothly your video plays. Each frame is a still image and when they’re shown one after the other, really quickly, they look like they’re moving – think of a flip book! The more still images you have (so, the more frames) the smoother the motion is. The FPS is how many of those still images are displayed (or rendered) in one second. There are standards, like 24fps, 30, 60, 120 and so on. Higher frames will be smooth, but we’re limited as humans to what we can perceive anyway. 24fps is considered the minimum for us to see it looking good. Sometimes video games will be quite high so that they’re more responsive. The long and short of this is that although high frame rate is great for the perceived motion, it’s terrible for slowing down the rendering process. Again, balance.

Codec

Codec is short for compression-decompression, and essentially, it’s a software or hardware tool that compresses and decompresses video and audio data. Codecs are essential for reducing the size of video files without losing quality. Codecs are always being superseded by new versions, so do some reading around the best current ones to use.

Learn more: What is a Codec?

Bitrate

Bitrate is the data that’s processed per second in a video. Higher bitrates mean better video quality, but, you guessed it, larger file sizes and longer rendering times.

Tips for Efficient Video Rendering

Rendering video can take a long time, sometimes hours! And it’ll take up a good amount of resources on your computer or device while doing it. There are a lot of factors that will mean slower rendering:

Length of the film
Your computer’s performance – things like CPU, RAM, GPU, storage drive type, and so on
Which rendering software you’re using
The frames in your video
How complex your timeline is (lots of complex graphics will slow things down for example)

Here are some tips to speed up your video rendering.

Hardware Acceleration

If you can upgrade your machine, do it. Video projects generally need computers with good enough hardware to run complex tasks efficiently. Any part of that that you can help speed up or make more efficient, will make rendering less time-consuming. Using solid-state drives (SSDs) can help with read and write operations during rendering.

Proxy Editing

For detailed projects, try proxy video, where you work with lower-resolution versions of your media while editing. This reduces the strain on your system and speeds up the editing process because the smaller files will run more efficiently than huge raw files.

Render Preview

Before you commit to a full render, try the ‘render preview’ option to check a small section of your video for any problems. Creating preview cache files can stop your program from crashing if there’s too much going on.

Render in Batches

For long videos or again for really complex projects, you might want to render in batches. This will let you section off parts of the load and your computer will be able to manage resources better.

Stay Organised

This is definitely something that slips with a lot of video projects, but staying organised can actually help you with many things, including rendering video. If you’ve got a good structure and clear file naming and folder organisation, it can help prevent errors during rendering.

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How to Render Video

How you render video will be slightly different depending on the software you use, but the core idea is the same. Here’s an overview of the typical steps:

Before Rendering

Preview and Playback

Preview your video in your editing software to check for any issues or errors.
Make any adjustments to timing, effects, and other elements.

Rendering Settings

Go to the rendering or export settings in your video editor.
Choose the output format, codec, and video settings (bitrate, quality etc).
Set the destination folder where the rendered video will be saved.

Render Queue

Add your project to the render queue if your software has one.
Review the settings and make sure everything looks right – you don’t want to have to do it again because of an oversight.

Start Rendering

Start your video render by clicking the "Render," "Export," or similar button.
Depending on the length and complexity of your video, rendering might take a while! You can’t always sit over the computer while it renders, but you should check in and monitor the progress every so often so make sure there are no crashes.

After Rendering

Quality Check

Once rendering is finished, play the video to make sure it looks and sounds like it should.
Check for any artefacts, glitches, or issues that may have arisen during rendering. Glitches and anomalies flashing on the screen can be common issues when rendering, so make sure you watch the whole video carefully, particularly if you’re sending it on to a client.

If you're happy with the rendered video and everything looks good, save it to your desired location.
You’re ready to send, upload a video-sharing platform, or whatever your next step may be!

Backup and Archive

Sometimes we can miss out this step, but make sure to back up your files and the rendered video for future reference or editing.
Continue to keep your media assets and all your project files organised. If you end up doing an edit and a new render of the same project, save these under new names (usually updated, similar names to the original so it’s easy to see what order they came in) and never save over the previous project with the new one, or you leave yourself nowhere to go if something goes wrong with that version.

Envato Elements

When you need a break from discovering what rendering a video means, why not take a look at Envato Elements where you can find templates, music tracks, graphics, and a whole bunch of creative video assets, all for one monthly subscription.

There are free files at Elements too, new ones every month, so check those out too and don’t miss out on a freebie.

Conclusion

Understanding what rendered video means, the technical aspects involved, and the popular software options available will all help you to make the right choices for your project, and to create and share high-quality videos. Remember, it’s all a balance between quality and size, so you really need to grasp those fundamentals so you can end up with something that looks great and doesn’t grind your computer to a halt in the process!

About This Page

This page was written by Marie Gardiner. Marie is a writer, author, and photographer. It was edited by Gonzalo Angulo. Gonzalo is an editor, writer and illustrator.

What Does Rendered Video Mean? Definition & Guide for 2025