Now that the animation is finished, you can preview it with the Play button. However, you will probably want to view it as an AVI file with much higher quality. For that, you have to render the animation first.

Click Render to Disk on the Fractal menu to open the Render to Disk dialog.

The Render to Disk dialog looks a bit different than you might be used to, because it contains options specific to animations that are normally hidden.

• From the File Format drop-down list, choose AVI movie. The Export Options dialog will pop up so you can set additional options for the AVI format.
• The list of compressors depends on what is installed on your computer. Some are better suited to fractal movies than others — it is best to experiment. For now, choose Cinepak Codec by Radius, set Quality to 100% and Key frame to once in every 15 frames. Click OK.
• If you prefer a different destination file than what Ultra Fractal automatically suggests, enter it into the Destination File input box, or click its Browse button.
• In the Animation area, set Frame Range to Entire Animation. You can use this option to render only a selected range of frames, or just the current frame.
• Set Motion Blur to Normal. This applies a motion blur effect to animated zooms, which makes them smoother and more natural-looking.

The other options are the same as when rendering still images. You can set them as you prefer, but make sure to enable anti-aliasing for the best results. If you check the Open when finished option, Ultra Fractal will automatically open the resulting AVI file in the default player, for example Windows Media Player.

• Click OK to start rendering. The Render to Disk tool window opens to display the rendering progress. Since animations are much more complex to calculate than still fractals, the render can easily take an hour or more, depending on the width and height that you selected for the final movie.

Congratulations! You have made it to the end of this tutorial. We have used most of the animation features of Ultra Fractal to make this animation, and you probably have many ideas for your own animations now.

For more information, please refer to the Animation chapter of the help file. Enjoy!