Export
Five formats, four scales, no tier limit.
Formats
The list changes with what you have loaded.
| Format | Offered when |
|---|---|
| PNG | always |
| JPG | always |
| GIF | the output is animated |
| MP4 Anim | the output is animated |
| MP4 Video | a video is loaded |
There is no SVG and no plain-text export. If you want the characters as text, that is not something the engine writes today.
Scale
Scale is a multiplier on your original source dimensions, not on the preview canvas. So a 1920x1080 photo at 2x is exactly 3840x2160.
The options are 1x to 4x, filtered by what your device and the encoder can actually handle. Stills cap at 16,384px or your GPU's texture limit, whichever is lower. GIF caps at 2048px and 4 megapixels. Video caps at 4096px, or 2560px on iOS.
4K is not a preset and not a tier. You reach it by picking a scale that multiplies your source up to it. Free and Pro accounts have identical export options.
Video
MP4 Video transcodes the clip you loaded. Frame rate is fixed at 30fps, length follows the source, and it is capped at 9000 frames, which is five minutes.
MP4 Anim and GIF render a synthetic loop instead. Pick a duration of 3, 5, 10 or 15 seconds and a frame rate of 15, 20, 24, 30 or 60.
Encoding is H.264. If the hardware encoder refuses a stream, it retries down a ladder of profiles and then of resolutions rather than failing outright.
Transparency
Set the backdrop to None (Transparent) in the style panel and the glyphs keep their alpha.
Only PNG preserves it. JPEG has no alpha channel, GIF quantises it away, and both MP4 paths fill the frame black before drawing because H.264 has no alpha.
Watermarks
There are none, at any tier. No watermark exists anywhere in the product.
Filenames
Exports are numbered ascii-magic-1.png, ascii-magic-2.png and so on, with
the counter kept in your browser.
What each format preserves
| Format | Alpha | Colour | Motion | Use it when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PNG | Yes | Lossless | No | You used bgMode: none, or you want the render exactly as drawn. |
| JPG | No | Lossy | No | The render is photographic and the file needs to be small. Alpha is filled, not kept. |
| GIF | 1-bit | 256 colours | Yes | A short loop that has to play inline anywhere. Palette-limited styles survive this best. |
| MP4 Anim | No | Full | Yes | An animated render of a still source, as a real video file. |
| MP4 Video | No | Full | Yes | A video source, restyled. |
Scale, concretely
Scale multiplies your original source dimensions, never the preview canvas. The preview size, the zoom level and the window size have no effect on what comes out.
| Source | 1x | 2x | 3x | 4x |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1920 x 1080 | 1920 x 1080 | 3840 x 2160 | 5760 x 3240 | 7680 x 4320 |
| 3000 x 2000 | 3000 x 2000 | 6000 x 4000 | 9000 x 6000 | 12000 x 8000 |
| 800 x 600 | 800 x 600 | 1600 x 1200 | 2400 x 1800 | 3200 x 2400 |
Not every cell in that table is reachable. Stills cap at 16,384px or your GPU's texture limit, whichever is lower, so the 12000px column depends on your hardware. If a scale will not fit, it is reduced automatically and you are told which scale you actually got. If the source will not fit even at 1x, the export refuses rather than writing something broken.
Effects scale with it
Blur radii, scan-line spacing, chromatic offsets, pixelate and halftone cell size, glitch slice height and ASCII cell size are all multiplied by the export scale. A 4x render is the preview at four times the size, not the preview with four times finer grain, so you can judge an effect at preview size and trust it.
Animation
A still source can still produce motion, because many styles animate their own parameters. The loop length is 3, 5, 10 or 15 seconds, and the format list grows GIF and MP4 Anim as soon as the output is animated.
A video source exports at its own length, capped at 9000 frames.
There is no SVG and no plain-text export. The output is an image of characters, not characters, so there is nothing to paste into a terminal. If that is what you need, this is the wrong tool and that is worth knowing before you build a workflow on it.
Device ceilings
| Ceiling | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Still image | 16,384px, or your GPU texture limit | Canvas cannot exceed the texture limit. |
| GIF | 2048px and 4 megapixels | Encoder limit, not a policy. |
| Video | 4096px, or 2560px on iOS | iOS caps hardware encode lower than everything else. |
| Video length | 9000 frames, five minutes at 30fps | Memory during encode. |
These are device and encoder limits. They are identical on free and Pro.
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