The honest answers.
Honesty is the brand: a tool you trust with a 6 GB commit because it tells you what it doesn’t know.
Why not just record my screen?
Recording throws away the quality that made the artifact worth making. It captures in real time, so it drops frames, drifts, and smears gradients — and it can’t do transparency. Renderkiln builds the video frame by frame: buttery motion, clean color, ready to drop on a timeline.
Free cloud converters exist. Why use Renderkiln?
They’re fine for a quick, watermarked MP4 — but they upload your work to a server, and still can’t give you a transparent background, ProRes, or a true 60 fps. Renderkiln does it all on your Mac, so your content never goes to someone else’s server, and you get broadcast-grade quality with alpha.
Do I need to be technical to use it?
Not at all. It’s built for editors, creators, and marketers — not engineers. Nothing to install beyond the app, no command line, no settings to wrangle. Drag in the artifact, choose where it’s headed, hit Render. If you can use a screen recorder, you can use this.
What can it turn into video?
Self-contained motion graphics — Claude Design and other AI artifact exports, plus animation made with GSAP, CSS, Lottie, SVG, canvas, and video. If it animates in a browser, Renderkiln can fire it into a clip.
How do I get a transparent overlay onto my timeline?
Turn on a transparent background (or knock out a color) and export ProRes 4444 — true alpha that Premiere, Resolve, Final Cut, After Effects, and Motion read natively. No keying. Want a lighter file? Export a luma matte for the Fill + Matte workflow.
What about audio?
The render is silent by design — capture is purely visual, which is what keeps it flawless. Music and voiceover (with volume, auto-ducking, and text-to-speech) are added separately, part of the v1.0 sprint. It’s the step that turns a clean clip into a postable video.
ProRes files are big. Will it warn me first?
Yes — Renderkiln shows a size estimate as you change settings and checks your disk space before it starts. And Test fire renders a one-second proof slice into Quick Look, so you can sanity-check a big render before committing.
Is my work uploaded anywhere?
No. Unlike a cloud converter, Renderkiln doesn’t send your animation to a server — all the processing happens on your Mac, and the app uploads none of your content. No account, no behavioral tracking. The one thing it may send is anonymous crash diagnostics (to fix bugs); they never include your content, and you can turn them off. Once you save a file, your own backup or sync services handle it on your settings — your choice, not the app’s.
What do I need to run it?
A Mac on a recent version of macOS — nothing else to install. ProRes export depends on your hardware; if a Mac can’t do it, Renderkiln says so plainly and MP4 holds the same frames.
Will the video look exactly like the preview?
Yes. What you see in the live preview is what gets saved, frame for frame — and rendering again gives an identical file. What you approve is what ships.
How do I get it?
Renderkiln is in private beta on macOS via TestFlight. Join to fire your first artifact into real video and help shape v1.0.