So everything is finalised. You’ve got your perfect shots, edited them with some sweet cuts, tightened up the audio and even thrown some rad post-production skills into the mix. Now all you have to do is get your edit out of your software and onto your computer or a DVD.

Somehow software developers have turned something this simple into one of the biggest challenges in video editing. There are about a million different formats and then a million more different options within each one. They’re all a headache to deal with. My advice is to think about where your video is going to be played and then research the best format rather than just choosing randomly.

Most likely your edit is destined for the web. I’d recommend Vimeo over YouTube for quality and support. It has provided a whole bunch of handy video guides on how to render your video perfectly for all of the main software packages here. One thing that’s worth noting is you can never ‘upgrade’ the quality of your video. So if you’ve filmed it in ‘standard definition’, there’s really no point in trying to render it in 1080 as it will just ruin all your hard work so far.