Advanced Export

Advanced Export

Advanced Export provides you with many customizable options for the export process, such as format, resolution, playback style, etc.

In Advanced Export, your options will change depending on the 'Format' you choose (each detailed below), but you will always see the preview window, the preview bar, and three buttons at the top of the interface:

A preview of your movie will render when you enter Advanced Export, but afterwards this button will be greyed out until you make a change that will affect your output.

Any visual change you make will allow you to press 'Preview' again, which will re-render the output preview window to the left.

While a preview is rendering, this button will change to 'Stop' - tapping this will stop the current preview from rendering.

Your movie compressed into a series of thumbnails that demo its content at different times. Scrub back and forth on the Preview bar with a finger or Apple Pencil to check different parts of your movie based on your most-recently rendered preview.

The rendered preview of your movie based on the currently-chosen time in the Preview bar. You can pinch to zoom and pan this just as you would the Stage.

Cancel the output and return to the Timeline.

Confirm your settings and begin rendering the movie. Once it has finished rendering, you will be able to share it using iPadOS' Share system.

Format: Video

Select from the type of export you would like. The options are:

1. Video - a movie file that you can play back on most modern video playback applications and social media platforms.

2. GIF - a looping (either regular or ping pong) animation format popularized around the turn of the century, reinvigorated by our new export system.

3. Current frame - the frame you have currently selected, in various resolutions and image formats.

4. Frames as images - your movie rendered out to a sequence of individual pictures, in a variety of image formats.

Select from a preset resolution for your image, or customize it to your liking:

1. Document size - renders the movie at your current Stage resolution.

2. 720p - this scales your movie and renders it at 1280 x 720 pixels. For 1:1 aspect movies, this will be 720 x 720 pixels.

3. 1080p - this scales your movie and renders it at 1920 x 1080 pixels. For 1:1 aspect movies, this will be 1080 x 1080 pixels.

4. 4K - this renders your movie at 3840 x 2160 pixels. For 1:1 aspect movies, this will be 2160 x 2160 pixels.

5. Custom - choose a custom pixel resolution for your video, using a numerical input. This will be locked to the aspect ratio of your current Stage area.

Select from different ways to encode your video file, using modern standards:

1. H.264 - the most common format for recording, compressing, and sharing video files. You may also know this as AVC (Advanced Video Coding). This will have solid compatibility across devices.

2. HEVC - Also known as H.265, HEVC is the intended followup to H.264. It offers better compression and also has an alpha-channel for videos that contain transparency.

3. Apple ProRes - Apple's set of proprietary video codecs that support large resolutions and high quality video. Procreate Dreams can export using the 422, 422 Proxy, 422 LT, 422 HQ, XQ, and 4444 variants. The 4444 variant houses an alpha-channel, which means it also supports videos with transparency.

Select from .mp4 or .mov - the video file will have this extension upon successful export.

Choose the playback setting for your output movie:

1. One Shot - plays your entire movie once from start to end

2. Ping Pong - plays the movie once from start to end and (reversed) from end to start, one time

Choose from two different audio codecs for your movie export:

1. Linear PCM - a high-quality codec that will offer good sound fidelity at the cost of higher file sizes.

2. AAC - an audio codec that will compress the audio but still offer decent sound quality.

Format: GIF

Select from the type of export you would like. The options are:

1. Video - a movie file that you can play back on most modern video playback applications and social media platforms.

2. GIF - a looping (either regular or ping pong) animation format popularized around the turn of the century, reinvigorated by our new export system.

3. Current frame - the frame you have currently selected, in various resolutions and image formats.

4. Frames as images - your movie rendered out to a sequence of individual pictures, in a variety of image formats.

Select from a preset resolution for your image, or customize it to your liking:

1. Document size - renders the movie at your current Stage resolution.

2. 480p - this scales your movie and renders it at 853 x 480 pixels. For 1:1 aspect movies, this will be 480 x 480 pixels.

3. 720p - this scales your movie and renders it at 1280 x 720 pixels. For 1:1 aspect movies, this will be 720 x 720 pixels.

4. 1080p - this scales your movie and renders it at 1920 x 1080 pixels. For 1:1 aspect movies, this will be 1080 x 1080 pixels.

5. 4K - this renders your movie at 3840 x 2160 pixels. For 1:1 aspect movies, this will be 2160 x 2160 pixels.

6. Custom - choose a custom pixel resolution for your video, using a numerical input. This will be locked to the aspect ratio of your current Stage area.

Select from different time intervals between frames in your rendered GIF output, or choose 'Automatic' to let Procreate Dreams handle it for you:

2. 10 ms - the time between each frame of your output GIF will be ten milliseconds.

3. 50 ms - the time between each frame of your output GIF will be fifty milliseconds.

4. 200 ms - the time between each frame of your output GIF will be two hundred milliseconds.

5. 500 ms - the time between each frame of your output GIF will be five hundred milliseconds.

Choose from two different playback modes for your GIF export:

1. Loop - your exported video file will play back from start to finish repeatedly.

2. Ping Pong - your exported video will repeatedly play through to the end and back to the start.

Turning this on will enable 'dithering' for your GIF output. Because GIF is limited to a maximum palette of 256 unique colors, dithering is a clever method of interspersing pixels to produce the illusion of gradients. The two choices are explained below:

1. Diffuse: uses the 'Floyd-Steinberg' dithering method to process pixels left-to-right in rows. It will constrain each pixel to the palette and pass a fraction of the value to neighboring pixels, which are processed sequentially.

2. Stable: uses an 'ordered dithering' approach, where each frame of the movie is rendered at full bit-depth, then each individual pixel's value is altered as per an adjustment matrix. Low is the default matrix (2x2). Each Smoothness step above 'Low' will double the size of the matrix, leading to a more gradated result. The Intensity slider will push the pixel's values up or down before they are constrained to the palette.

Chooses whether you would like the background of your GIF to be filled with your background color or transparent.

If you toggle this on, you can set the threshold at which pixels appear/disappear. GIF does support transparency, but only in a binary sense - pixels will either be visible or invisible.

The Alpha Threshold slider value will dictate at what opacity any given pixel will become invisible (transparent) upon export.

Limits your GIF output to be within a range of colors up to 256 (GIF's maximum color range). Your choices are: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, and Custom.

Custom means that you define the exact number of colors between 2 and 256 (anything lower than two or higher than 256 will revert to those numbers respectively).

Toggling this on reveals a palette interface that allows you to specify the colors that you would like your GIF to render with.

This option builds a histogram of the colors used in your movie, sorts them into clusters, and attempts to find the closest actual color matches to your specified palette.

Format: Current frame and Frames as images

Select from the type of export you would like. The options are:

1. Video - a movie file that you can play back on most modern video playback applications and social media platforms.

2. GIF - a looping (either regular or ping pong) animation format popularized around the turn of the century, reinvigorated by our new export system.

3. Current frame - the frame you have currently selected, in various resolutions and image formats.

4. Frames as images - your movie rendered out to a sequence of individual pictures, in a variety of image formats.

Select from a preset resolution for your image, or customize it to your liking:

1. Document size - renders the image at your current Stage resolution.

2. 480p - this scales your image and renders it at 853 x 480 pixels. For 1:1 aspect movies, this will be 480 x 480 pixels.

3. 720p - this scales your image and renders it at 1280 x 720 pixels. For 1:1 aspect movies, this will be 720 x 720 pixels.

4. 1080p - this scales your image and renders it at 1920 x 1080 pixels. For 1:1 aspect movies, this will be 1080 x 1080 pixels.

5. 4K - this renders your image at 3840 x 2160 pixels. For 1:1 aspect movies, this will be 2160 x 2160 pixels.

6. Custom - choose a custom pixel resolution for your image, using a numerical input. This will be locked to the aspect ratio of your current Stage area.

Choose from a selection of file formats for your exported image(s):

1. .png - a low-filesize high quality image format that supports transparency

2. .jpg - a compressed image that is smaller but may lose quality

3. .tiff - a very high-quality image format that supports transparency but will be larger

4. .tga - a simple and high-quality image format that supports transparency

5. .bmp - a high-quality image format that does not support transparency and can be larger in size