creating a movie or "fly-through," as it's officially called:

after all the details of your project have been finalized and every camera angle checked, hit F12, the short-cut you created for fly-through or use the pull down menus: document/creatve imaging/create fly-through. if it says "create VR object" or "create VR scene" under the heading "photorender projection,"instead of "create fly-through," then click once outside of the pull-down menus, to get rid of them and right-click over one of your cameras, that you've set up for this fly-through (you must be in 2D view!, F2 will get you there). a menu will pop-up. the third listing is "camera settings..." click once on this and a dialog box will appear. at the very top, will be 3 tabs: "camera", "VR object", "VR scene". click on "camera", then click on "apply", at the bottom of the dialog box. "X" out of the dialog box, if you wish and go back to "create fly-through", (see above).

another dialog box will appear. on the left side, several choices are shown under the "source" heading. checking "3D window" will create a fly-through that looks just like you model in 3D view (F3). the lines will be jagged and glass will appear opaque, etc. create this fly-through first, as it is much faster to create and will allow you to spot errors before spending days to photo-render a fianal version of your flythrough. when you are ready for the final product, check "photorender window". below that, be sure "perspectives from camera path:", "with inbetween frames" and "all frames" are checked.
on the right side, under the "result" heading, "quicktime movie file" and "true color - 24 bit" are standard and good choices. if you save the file as a quicktime file, you will need to have quicktime on your computer to view the fly-through you are about to create. you probably have quicktime on your computer already; if not, go to quicktime.com to download a free version. you can also save it as a "video movie file", which i believe is a windows media player file, or several different images or "3d studio max", "electricimage", or "vrml" files.
be sure "image compression" is checked.
click on "set...". be sure the "frames per second" is set to "30". the rest is ok at standard settings. click "ok", when you are finished and you will be brought back to the previous dialog box.
if you want a small file, click on "rescale" to scale-down the file size of your fly-through by decreasing the size of the window the fly-through will created in and viewed from.
when you are ready, click "save..." you will now be prompted for a file name and location to save it to. choose a name that is desciptive, yet under the 27 character limit and a folder near or in the same folder as your file, so you can eaily find it after it's been created, so you can view it. click ok and the fly-through will be created. the screen will now show every frame being created, with a small dialog box, labeled "creating fly-through", and, for example, "phase 5 of 1459", with time for completion at the bottom. please note that the archi-clock is not accurate. if it says 57 minutes, it may only take12 minutes. i rendered a mini movie that was listed as taking 1300 minutes and it only took a few hours.

good luck!

questions, comments?

file size:
movies can get big fast when rendering. a 30 second movie fly-through could be as big as 300 Mb. this giant file size is way too big to e:mail. what you have to do is reduce the file size by scaling down the size of the viewing window or by creating the fly-through in segments and e:mailing each segment seperately.

a good e:mail size is 2.3 Mb to 3.0 Mb

and a good size for websites is 4.0 to 4.9 Mb.

the e:mail size corresponds with the size of the viewing window, 160 pixels wide and 87 pixels high. this rescales the original image to 16% of its original size and records the fly-through movie at 10 frames-a-second, instead of the suggested 30 frames-a-second.

the web size fly-through movie window size should be 243 by 130, which is 24% of its orignial size and records the fly-through at 12 frames-a-second.

movies or "fly-throughs," have the ability to show off your project to a client, putting them in the driver seat, as if they are walking through the actual project.

suggestion:
before getting started making a movie, be sure all the details are finalized. use the 3D explore option to view your model inside and out to check every detail. after all the details have been verified, check the cameras, by clicking on each one, to see if the view is correct.
render movies can take a long time, overnite for 30 seconds of final product,
so do the 3D window version first, until you get all the camera angles just right, then do a photorendering movie.