First, "Hi, I'm new here." I'm also new to Poser. I'm using version 5. I hope to use Poser to supplement video footage. I made a 2 second clip yesterday. Under Make movie, I selected "Current Render Settings", which were 640 x 480, production quality. After processing each of the 60 frames most of the day, it produced a 2-second AVI of just the background (an imported jpg). My poser character was ommited entirely. Where did I go wrong? Thanks.

were you on the right camera??

You could try different codecs and see if still happens. As a general rule, you should prefer rendering to a series of still images over rendering directly to a movie file. For example, you can try different movie codecs and compression ratios without having to rerender the whole thing over and over again.

Wolf359, I guess I'm not yet aware of needing to chose a camera, as it relates to making the movie. I assumed it would create a movie of what I saw when I push play in the animation pallet. I don't see camera as a choice in the render settings. Where is that selected? Thanks. Stewer, thanks. I'll experiment with your suggestions.

You were correct in your assumption, Aspirin99; Poser automatically renders to whichever camera is currently selected. I can't imagine why it would only render the background, however, if other elements are in the frame. The codec shouldn't have an effect on this situation.

If you just render the scene as one picture, what happens? Does the character show then? It sounds very odd.

I'm doing just that now. I set it to make a movie with draft settings and quarter size over background color (versus my imported jpg). As a side note, if I "Make Movie" with the set to Display Settings (versus "Current Render Settings"), it does fine. At least I see my character and the motion I expected to see.

I remember a while ago, when someone had a similar problem, reinstalling/updating Windows Media Player fixed it for her/him. You could try installing the latest version of WMP, that could fix it.

Poser5 also has a problem rendering animations if the Windows Desktop is in 16 bit color mode. Curious Labs has verified that this is an issue. If you cannot solve it any other way, set your Desktop color resolution to 32-bit.

Wow, Zenman, didn't know that one. I just tried it with 16bit resultion and got a blank screen too. I will add that to my FAQ.