Greetings...... have you tried using AVI movies as backgrounds in your animations? What can you say about the use of Avi in Poser 5? Hmm....

if AVIs match the output movie - is easy to use as background. If they don't - best way to keep perspective and help stop pixalizing is to put on Square and size and move in your scene. I use bryce to make landscape avi (same size as my movie output in P5 PPP) and have had absolutely no problem but have noted others complaining of pixalization - I havent seen it using same size avi. OK now I am knocking on wood ;-)

i use it all the time. i render out my bryce/max animations at 1400x600 and keep my aspect ratio in p5. i havent noticed any pixelation at all. on an image background you would get pixelation but you gota play with the render settings to fix that. with p5's new atmospheric effects (which i havent tried and dont even know if they work) i suspect it will be easier to match a bryce exterior shot (with volumetrics) and the poser animations...

Video backgrounds work beautifully in Poser 5; unlike the P4 renderer, Firefly will rescale and smooth the video to eliminate jaggies.

One thing to watch out for, though ... make very certain that you don't run out of background frames during the render process, or while previewing the video in the Material Room. For instance, if the video background is 300 frames long, and the Poser animation is 350 frames, Poser will likely hang at frame 301 when it goes looking for the next background frame and can't find it. The loop option in the Movie shader does nothing, as far as I can tell. Poser 4 doesn't loop its backgrounds either, but at least it doesn't hang when it renders beyond them.

If you must use a shorter video, one workaround to avoid this bug involves plugging a set of math and variable nodes into the Movie shader's frame value to give yourself precise control over the progression of frames. With the proper setup, you can have it stop at the last frame, or loop back to the beginning.

I'm hoping this issue will be addressed in the next service release, but until then it can be avoided as long as you're aware of the problem and willing to take the necessary steps.

In case you didn't know, you can use animated GIF files with the Movie node, also, but the latest service releases mess up the GIF's colour palette. The initial release of P5 didn't have that problem.