Known limitations for playblast

Before you playblast, be aware of the following issues and known limitations:

• Playblast does not support virtual devices, as it requires real hardware to support the OpenGL initialization. For example, Microsoft's Remote Desktop, which uses a virtual device, is not supported.
• Playblasting depends upon your system movie libraries to generate the selected compression scheme. Autodesk cannot guarantee the reliability or success of all codecs available to your operating system. See Codec support for additional information. For QuickTime®, ensure that you have properly installed the most recent version.
• When playblasting an animation, ensure the Render offscreen option is turned on in the Playblast Options, or make sure that the area you want to playblast is not obscured by any windows.

  If an open window obscures the area where the screen will be grabbed, the first frame of your movie will display part of the window. This can also occur when a screensaver appears partway through playblasting a long animation.

• Playblast uses the $TEMP directory on Windows even if Save To File specifies a different directory. Make sure there is enough disk space to hold the playblast file in your $TEMP directory.
• Once your playblasted animation displays in a viewer window, you must close the viewer if you want to playblast the scene again. Maya cannot playblast the same scene again if the movie is still displayed in the viewer.
• The playback time of Playblast may be severely delayed in scenes with large imported .aiff audio files. For example, a 40MB .aiff file may cause a 20+ second delay between the initial command call and playback. As a workaround, view and play all (as long as your audio clips do not overlap) your loaded audio files from the Trax Editor or use multiple short audio files rather than single large audio files.