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I am new to Blender. I have a new Macbook Pro 2018 with the highest upgrades in memory, speed and all. Running newest os.

I watch a video about the fox logo from Matt Hoeker, and followed it to the letter. Everything goes exactly like the video until I hit render animation, and it goes to a new page as if it is going to render it and then within seconds I get the message at the top that reads, "Cannot open or start avi movie file". I checked the exchange where others have had this problem, but I do not see any solutions. I'm trying to do something cool for my school, but 2 hours of failing has me desperate for help. All the best, Mike

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  • $\begingroup$ Probably related blender.stackexchange.com/questions/31418/… $\endgroup$
    – AshKB
    Sep 12, 2018 at 1:31
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    $\begingroup$ it would be very helpfull if you could provide the link to the tutorial. My guess ist that you need to set the output folder to something you have write permissions (e.g. the "Documents" folder on OS X) $\endgroup$
    – miceterminator
    Sep 14, 2018 at 9:11

4 Answers 4

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Mac computers do not play avi files unless you use another video player to see it.

I recommend you to render your movie in mp4 format.

See this related answer:

MP4 video settings

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  • $\begingroup$ I do not see any option in blender for that. I hit render/ animate and do not see a choice. $\endgroup$
    – Michael Walker
    Sep 12, 2018 at 1:38
  • $\begingroup$ Choose ffmpeg as render type (instead of any image formats like PNG or JPEG), then choose the codec etc below. $\endgroup$
    – 3pointedit
    Sep 12, 2018 at 3:34
  • $\begingroup$ @MichaelWalker, See the updated answer. $\endgroup$
    – LeoNas
    Sep 12, 2018 at 11:44
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I know this is an old question, but since I got here searching for an answer for the same problem, I'd like to add the solution that worked for me:

I found several sources saying there might be a problem with the output folder. It might not be specified or doesn't exist. Even if it does, it might be worth trying to just choose a different one. For some reason Blender might not be able to write into the specified folder. Apparently, running Blender as the administrator (Windows...) has helped for some people with this problem. All that didn't work for me. The final solution was to also specify the file name in the output directory.

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I have this same problem rendering an .avi video in Blender and not being able to play it properly in Quicktime. My solution was to convert the frames into .mov inside Quicktime itself, and it worked relatively well.

Got to Quicktime > File > Open Image Sequence > Select Media. It will then convert the frames into video and you can save it in a folder of your choice.

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Older question, but I ran into it earlier today and it's still unanswered in many places. My research shows that Blender does this when it is unable to write / overwrite a file. For instance, this happens when: -Output folder does not exist -Previous rendered file is open in a program and cannot be overwritten

Explains why running in administrator mode sometimes works (for case 2) since this allows blender to overwrite a file in use by another program. Also explains why changing the output folder helps, as either a valid folder is selected or the previous file is not present and does not need to be overwritten.

To fix this, either close whatever program is using the rendered file (so it can overwrite it), or change the output name to create a new file. Both of these work for me.

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