Create a video
- Complete a Quarter-Car or Half-Car Transient Study and open Motion.
- Select Export Video. Choose Engineering Wide (16:9) or Engineering Vertical (9:16), Model or Vehicle, and 0.5×, 1× or 2× speed. Vehicle offers 3/4 and Side cameras.
- Set an optional title/subtitle (up to 80 characters each), opening card, configuration card and road-event labels. Generate the video. Progress counts rendered/encoded frames; Cancel stops further work. Keep the tab open until the download finishes.
Engineering Wide is 1920 × 1080; Engineering Vertical is 1080 × 1920. Both use 30 fps with physical metrics, original road trace(s), simulation time and a fixed “Generated with VehicleLab” watermark. No audio is added. The maximum output duration including cards is 120 seconds. Vertical reorganizes the visualization and readouts; it does not crop Wide.
Completed evidence and deterministic timing
Export reads the last completed Study, even after input edits. The panel identifies stale evidence; restoring the completed definition exactly restores current status. Export captures its source and settings when generation starts. Changing drafts or interactive playback cannot replace that source.
For physical duration D and speed s, engineering playback duration is D/s. Frame n starts at n/30 seconds within playback and samples physical time s·n/30. There are ceil(30·D/s) playback frames. The final interval is shortened if needed. The exact endpoint closes the final interval; it is not duplicated as an extra frame. A 5 s study at 1× yields 150 playback frames and 5 s of engineering playback. At 2× it yields 75 playback frames and 2.5 s. The optional opening adds 45 frames (1.5 s), the optional configuration card adds 60 frames (2 s), and the closing adds 30 frames (1 s). With both cards enabled, the 2× example totals 210 frames and 7 s. Cards have no engineering time. Interpolation is for display only; physics is never rerun and stored channels remain unchanged.
Publishing context
Opening and closing cards identify Study, Transient and the model. The configuration card shows four curated physical parameters from the completed definition, with units. See the Engineering Report for the full configuration. Road-event labels derive onset, bump peak/end, or step-rise completion from the explicit road definitions. Half-Car front and rear timing use each stored axle road; no event or settling conclusion is inferred from animation.
Titles are user-provided presentation text, not generated engineering conclusions. Settings stay in the mounted publishing panel for the session and are not saved in project files. Filenames include the sanitized project name when available, model, Study and orientation.
Read the engineering context
Readouts show physical acceleration, suspension travel and tire deflection for Quarter-Car; Half-Car shows body acceleration, pitch and front/rear travel. Units are always displayed. Vertical motion is amplified with the same completed-data envelope used by Motion. The gain is disclosed; it does not scale numerical readouts. Half-Car visible pitch follows amplified attachment geometry. Quarter-Car Vehicle wheels mirror one vertical corner and do not imply pitch or roll dynamics.
Front/rear road traces and pads represent prescribed axle inputs, not a spatial road reconstruction. Generic models are not measured-vehicle correlation or engineering recommendations.
Browser support and local processing
The browser must provide WebCodecs VideoEncoder and VideoFrame in a secure context (HTTPS or localhost) with a codec supporting the selected output dimensions. VehicleLab probes actual support, preferring MP4/H.264 and otherwise WebM/VP9. The panel names the selected format before generation. Codec availability depends on browser, OS and hardware; unsupported environments receive an explicit reason. There is no real-time recording fallback.
Vehicle export additionally requires WebGL. A missing module, unavailable context or context loss stops that export explicitly; select Model to use Canvas without WebGL. Response, projects and reports remain available. Encoding failures do not alter completed evidence.
Rendering, encoding and download happen locally. Nothing is uploaded. The encoder/muxer loads only when opening the video panel; Three.js loads only for Vehicle. Export owns its canvases and scene, awaits encoder backpressure and releases resources afterward. Final container writing may finish internally after cancellation, but the canceled artifact is not downloaded.
Publishing limits
Transient Study only. Compare Motion remains available separately; faithful Compare video needs a dedicated source-selection and shared-scale contract and is deferred. Frequency video, square output, live response plots, free-form editing, custom branding and audio are deferred. Encoding time varies by device and software/hardware codec. Compressed bytes and font/GPU rasterization can differ across machines; explicit timestamps and sampled engineering values remain deterministic. Downloads are buffered in memory; the duration limit bounds normal usage, not a guarantee against device memory exhaustion.
Mediabunny 1.56.2 provides browser-local encoding orchestration and container writing under MPL-2.0. Its unmodified source is available in the corresponding source package.