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Export a video

Boldbobbin can record an animation of your design stitching out, stitch by stitch, as a video file you can share. Use it for a shop listing, a social post, or to show a customer how a design will sew before you run it.

The Animate timeline​

Animate is on the bottom bar, and it opens a drawer above it: a per-color stitch-out timeline, one lane per color block, laid out along the order the machine sews, with a ruler of stitch numbers and a playhead across every lane. Click or drag to seek.

Jumps and trims are marked on it, so you can see where the machine stops, and an optional needle cursor shows where the needle is during playback. The drawer sizes itself to the number of colors, capping and scrolling for busy designs so it never swallows the canvas.

Open the export​

  1. Generate stitches, then open Animate.
  2. Click the camera button beside it, or Export video… in the drawer. (It's disabled until the design has stitches.)

The Export video dialog opens with a live preview you can Play, Pause, and Scrub.

Options​

  • Frame rate: frames per second of the video, 30 fps or 60 fps. 60 fps plays smoother.
  • Aspect ratio: Hoop (your hoop's proportions), Square (1:1), Portrait (9:16), or Widescreen (16:9). Pick the shape of the place you will post it: square for a feed, portrait for stories and short vertical video, widescreen for a video site.
  • Size: the output resolution, 720px, 1080px, or 1440px on the long side.
  • Speed: how fast it stitches, in stitches per second (st/s). Pick a preset or type your own. A faster speed gives a shorter video.
  • Look: Stitch view (flat) or Realistic view. Realistic view needs WebGPU, and takes longer to encode.
  • Stitch thickness: how thick the stitches draw in Stitch view. In Realistic view the slider is locked, and each thread is drawn at its own weight (a color with no weight draws as 40 wt, 0.4 mm).
  • Background: a solid color or Transparent (Stitch view only). Transparent video is saved as WebM (MP4 has no transparency).
  • Show hoop boundary: draw the hoop outline in the video.
  • Hold last frame: how many seconds to linger on the finished design at the end.
  • File name: the name of the saved file.

The dialog shows the duration and frame count as you change settings, and warns if the video will be long.

Example: a vertical clip for a social post
  1. Set Aspect ratio to Portrait (9:16) and Size to 1080px.
  2. Raise Speed until the Duration line reads a length that suits the post (a faster speed means a shorter clip).
  3. Set Hold last frame to 2 s, so the finished design stays on screen at the end.
  4. Click Export.

Export​

Click Export. Boldbobbin encodes the video (Encoding… %) and saves it when it's done. Video is written as MP4, with a WebM fallback (and always WebM for a transparent background). If your browser can't encode video, the dialog says so; the desktop app and recent Chrome-based browsers work.

Watermark​

On the Free plan, exported videos carry a small "Made with Boldbobbin" watermark. Pro removes it. See Plans and credits.