AE only exporting the entire screen, not my compositions?

So I just stayed up the entire night rotoing a piece and now AE won't export anything correctly. When Exporting Quicktime>NTSC DV I don't get what have in my compositions, I get anywhere from 1-10 second video screen capture, 1650x1050 in whatever format I've designated. I didn't even know this was possible with AE, so I don't know how to reverse engineer it. Any takers?

 

Hmm... screenshot of your project?

Only thing I can think of, is make sure in your project window (where it lists your footage, sounds, etc) you have the Comp selected that you want to render... I've accidentally had a core layer selected once, and when I rendered it I got a saber matte instead of my final project... lol

 

Something else I just realized, the movie files its making are real time, it's showing itself rendering the screenshot movie! Not even something I did before that! Help!

 

You're not actually using the "Export" option, are you? As I understand it, that's for some sort of oddball exporting for use with other Adobe products.

Use Composition>Make Movie to actually spit out a proper video file.

And RTFM.