Go to file > Import... to import your selected animation scene file
Set the start and end frame of your timeslider to make sure your entire animation can be seen
Move your the 'render_cam' so that your full animation can be viewed and framed the way you want within the green box in your main panel viewport. Play through your entire animation to ensure that your whole animated sequence will be framed properly.
hit 7 on the keyboard to activate hardware lighting. This will give you a basic idea of the lighting setup for your scene.
Make any adjustments you like to the ground plane and lights you would like. You can move the ground plane or rotate the lights to change their angle. Remember that keyLight is the main light that is the brightest and casts shadows. The fill light should essentially aimed in the oposite direction as the keyLight.
Change your Maya Menu set to Rendering by going to the dropdown box in the upper left of your maya interface and choosing "Rendering"
Test a few frame renders by going to the menus at the top
Render > Render Current Frame. You can hit escape on your keyboard to cancel a render in the middle if you like.
Once you are happy with the camera, lights and render samples you are ready to do a batch render. First we need to make some changes to the render settings
Window > Rendering Editors > Render Settings
In the common tab make the following adjustments
file name prefix -> enter a base file name for your output.
Image format -> Windows Bitmap
Frame/Animation ext -> name.#.ext
Frame padding -> 3
Start frame -> Your animation start frame number
End frame -> Your animation end frame number
Renderable Camera -> render_cam
!!! Note the path where the images will be rendered to at the top of this window below the common tab
Go to Render > Batch Render... to start your batch render of your frame sequence
Once it is completed you can view all of your final rendered frames in the location you noted from the render settings
compile these frames into a compressed h264 quicktime movie for submission.