Rendering a Movie in Maya

Rendering a movie outputs your animation as a series of images that play in real time. Your output from Maya can either be a series of individual images or a self contained movie file such as QuickTime or AVI.

Step One
Make sure you have set a project and saved your scene in the project's scenes folder. For more info see the topic, Project (Set) or Project (Start). 

Step Two
To set the final image size, resolution, frames and quality you need to access the render options. Click the Render Settings Window icon. 

Step Three
At the top of the render options dialog box, select the render method (i.e., Maya Software). Under the Common tab, scroll down to set the image format. For self contained movies choose QuickTime (Mac) or AVI (PC). If you are saving a series of images, choose IFF or another format that your compositing software can recognize.

Step Four
Set the Start Frame and End Frame. For instance if you have a 24 frame movie, the start frame is 1 and the end frame is 24. Cell padding sets the number of digits used to number an image sequence. If you input a cell padding of 2, your images would be numbered image01 to image99.

Step Five
Be sure to select the camera, then click the Maya Software tab and select Production Quality and close the render options palette.
Step Six
Choose Render > Batch Render (in the Rendering menu set). Once complete, your movie or image sequence can be found in the project's images folder.

Step Six
Choose Render > Batch Render (in the Rendering menu set). Once complete, your movie or image sequence can be found in the project's images folder.

Information from: http://pixelstreetstudios.com/maya80/renderMovie/