Export

Writing the finished work out to a fixed file. The last decision, and the one most often rushed.

Export is where the finished work is frozen into the file the world will actually meet: codec, bitrate, colour, dimensions, all decided in one dialog, usually at the day's exhausted end. The edit was months; the export is minutes; the audience only ever sees the minutes.

Rushed because it feels like formality, and it is anything but: a wrong colour space dulls every image, a greedy compression undoes the grade, a misnamed file strands the master. Our defence is a written recipe per destination, settings decided once in calm, applied forever after without reopening the argument at midnight.