I'm working on a video project and need to make the folowing type of animation; low level "flying" over a tranquil landscape with a flower-filled field, some trees, distant hills/mountains, and forested areas. I want it to have a general light haze and appear to be sometime like late sunrise. Can Vue do this easily, or will the render times be prohibitive? I need it rendered at 720 x 480 with the Canopus DV codec. I'm running a powerful dual Athlon 1800+ with 1 gig of ram. There will be several "passes" of different areas in the field, culminating in a close-up shot of someone blue-screened into the field (done in After Effects). I own Vue, but up until now have just "dabbled" with it to make a few stills... Thanks in advance for any input on this project.

What you described above would be no problem to pull off in Vue. As for render times, most of that will depend on the quality you choose to render at, i.e.Broadcast, Ultra, etc., the length of your animation and the frame rate.

And if you have Mover 4, you can render over a network. This makes rendertime shorter:-)

if you do have Vue, wouldn't it be easiest to create the scene, render one fraame and multiply that number with the amount of frames you need. You will have two answers. 1. Is Vue capable to create the sort of landscape you need - and are you able to create this too. 2. How long it will take to render this animation on your system. All our tips will be guessing, without knowing the sort of landscape you do have in mind and without knowing the environment you have, The reason why i say that is, that i always found that there is a big difference in what someone is able to create and what i am able to. Everybody has his/her strengths and weaknesses. And even similar systems could react very differently, depending what sort of things are installed on it.

Yes, I Think I am capable of creating what I have in mind... I like the idea you have of trying one frame and extrapolating from there what total render times would be. Has anyone tried XTune from tyhe makers of XFrog. I also have XFrog and love it for creating beautiful trees to render elsewhere. My concern with XFrog (and Vue for that matter) was the potentially huge render hits from multiple trees over the course of 15-20 second animations. XTune appears to nicely reduce the polygon count... I think it's time to try their fully functional demo...

A word of cauton regarding rendering one frame and estimating based on that frames render time. You need to consider the complexity of different frames as you move closer to objects as the render may require more calcualtions to get the job done. The further away you are the faster the render. As-well-as many other things affect the render times.

Also, you don't really want VUE to compress it for you? Render it out as uncompressed, and use cleaner or something else to compress it to the codec you want.

As an aside, and just for my own interest, how will you matchmove the bluescreen person with the animation footage?

???