Play Rendered Animation is all gray I have created an animation that plays properly when I'm in normal object manipulation mode but when I try "Play Rendered Animation" it just shows a blank gray screen (below), though the /tmp/*.png values are changing. I have tried this with Blender Render and Cycles Render with the same output.



I definitely have a light source, and here is what it looks like when I simply click Render for the current frame:



What should be happening is that spacecraft in the image does a "flyby" of the planet. I am using Blender 2.76 and am very new; your help is much appreciated! I can't figure out how to attach the .blend file, but here are the error messages I have in the terminal:

Executing command:
'/Applications/Blender/blender.app/Contents/MacOS/blender -a -f 24 1.0 -s 1 -e 200 -j 1 /tmp/0001.png'
ndof: 3Dx driver not found
playanim_toscreen: no ibuf for picture '/tmp/0039.png'
playanim_toscreen: no ibuf for picture '/tmp/0052.png'
playanim_toscreen: no ibuf for picture '/tmp/0030.png'
playanim_toscreen: no ibuf for picture '/tmp/0035.png'
playanim_toscreen: no ibuf for picture '/tmp/0045.png'
playanim_toscreen: no ibuf for picture '/tmp/0052.png'
So there might be a number of things that are happening. Firstly, I would just create a folder and set it as the location where it saves all the rendered images. I personally don't like using the temp folder because there might be other stuff in there. Then you need to go to the Video Sequence Editor and select "open" and select all the images you rendered and the play it. 

Here is a Tutorial

The other thing that is unlikely is maybe something is in front of the camera that is hidden to the viewport but isn't hidden in the render check this in the Outliner. If you want to do a test animation to see how things look just lower the settings and samples and then put it together and see how it looks or you can just play the animation in the viewport. Hope this helped, best of luck to you.