I have had fun making little animations with Poser 4, using secondary programs (like VirtualDub) to do the video editing. I now have Poser 5, but the output avi files are not handled properly by VirtualDub or other video editors that I have. In some cases, the files will not play at all. In other cases, the files play okay, but when I try to re-encode them after editing, the re-encoding fails or produces bizarre results. Anyone know how to fix this? Thanks in advance.

Not offhand. The only time I have problems with the .avi files is when Poser crashes before finishing the animation. In that circumstance, Poser doesn't write the back-end of the file, and the .avi cannot be recognized by players or editors, even if it's 99.9% finished.

I've also experienced a strange problem (with both P4 and P5) where, after rendering and outputing an .avi, I cannot output another without crashing Poser thereafter. Rebooting is necessary if I want to do more. In all fairness, I suspect this is more of an issue with my installation of Video for Windows than it is a Poser bug. My media player sometimes misbehaves with files I know are fine.

But for the reasons above, I'm now reluctantly outputing all of my animations as image sequences, rather than .avi files. If and when Poser crashes due to cumulative memory leaks, I can relaunch and continue rendering the sequence from the point it prematurely ended. And I can assemble the image sequences into .avi files using VirtualDub, Animation Shop, or other utilities.

Thanks for your thoughts. I hadn't thought of outputting the anims as image sequences. However, even that has not solved the problem completely. It's really strange, because the original avi anims from Poser 5 do appear to be complete, and will play just fine in Windows Media Player or elsewhere. It's not until I try to re-encode them (even using the same codec I used to make the avi in Poser 5) that things go bonkers. Even more strange is the fact that it STILL HAPPENS even if I ouput as an image sequence and recompile in VirtualDub, as you suggested; when I go to encode the sequence as an avi, I get an ouput avi file that has the picture shifted or slanted with weird coloring, which is the same thing that happens if I try to re-encode an original avi output from Poser 5. This makes no sense to me. It's as if there is something in the images themselves that throws off the encoding process in the video editor. I never have this problem with avi output from Poser 4. Well, I'm still stumped, but thanks again for your input.

A few things to check: Does this happen with all codecs, or a specific codec? Are you making any changes to the video other than recompressing (resizing, colour-depth, etc.)? Does it occur even with uncompressed video? If you still have Poser 4 installed, can you do a quick render to see if the problem is now occuring with P4?

Thanks for sticking with me on this. It happens with all codecs and even when no changes are being made to the video. I don't think I've tried uncompressed video, but I will. I have gone back to Poser 4 for my animation project, and there are no problems with the avi output. Any more ideas? I'd love to get this problem resolved, so I can work in just one version of Poser and not have to keep going back and forth just to do the animation part. Thanks again.