I've finally seen the light ... rendering still image files when using Poser for animation produces vastly superior images than rendering directly to .avi. I've been using Quicktime Pro to combine image files generated by Poser, but using QT on a PC has its limitations, especially when you don't want the end product to be a .mov file. Can anyone please recommend good applications for combining images into an animation?

www.ulead.com media studio free 30day trial www.adobe.com Adobe premiere or after affects www.apple.com shake if your on a Mac

ulead media studio 8 is good too.. I use for quick things also Quick Time pro for short scenes always better that .avi codec. then for bigger productions Adobe after effects but MC said it already.. rendering still images is much quicker, better quality and faster for sure.. you get 100% quality, you can quick edid frame if you wish, add filters in photoshop or painter..( take some time for big scenes ) :) Cath

Virtualdub can import image sequences. Plus it's free.

"Virtualdub can import image sequences" - *.bmp and *.tga only.

Thank you very much for the suggestions! Ulead looks fantastic, but a bit out of my price range at the moment. I will keep it in mind and try the demo, though. Embarassingly enough, I've had Virualdub for a long time, but never noticed the image importing function before. Cath, you're so right. It's really nice to be able to touch up the frames in Photoshop prior to concatinating. I seem to remember someone mentioning another free app ... I thought it was called "Bink," but I couldn't find it by that name. Anyone know what I'm actually trying to remember?

You can find Ulead Media Studio Pro on Ebay for about $50 it's version 6 not the newest, but certainly a good deal for what you get. You could also check out MGI Video Wave but I found it rather cheesy, good for assembling, but lacking otherwise. I got Media Studio off ebay for about $35, didn't care about upgrading or reging it, though the copy I got was from a software distributor and I could reg it. Decent little app. Adobe stuff is alway pricey, but man oh man there is a reason it just does what ya want it too but at a high cost.

"Embarassingly enough, I've had Virualdub for a long time, but never noticed the image importing function before." It's not a seperate function as such, just use the 'open video file' dialogue and select the first frame.

Bink? That's part of the free RAD Video Tools. Haven't used it in a while, but it's still available.

And here's a link to VirtualDub, for those who are curious:
http://www.virtualdub.org/

Oh, another free app for assembling image sequences: TMPGEnc Reads BMP, TGA, and JPEG images. Primarily an MPEG encoder, but it can export AVI files, also.

That's the one, LD! Just downloaded the suite. Thanks again to all for the great suggestions, I'm sure they'll be useful to others, too.

I've never seen a time differance between rendering a movie or a whole bunch of stills.

Just wanted to note that QuickTime Pro will also export AVI files. So you're not limited to saving an image sequence (or any other movie) in the .MOV format.

I've tried many different ways to generate Poser animations then burn them to DVD. So far, the best quality videos I've been able to create for a DVD were produced using the following steps:

1. Generate image sequence in .PSD format.

2. Do any image manipulation I need in Photoshop (esp. using batch processing mode)

3. Open the image sequence in QuickTime Pro.

4. Go to Movie Properties / Video Track / Quality and check the "High Quality" check box (unchecked by default).

5. Save as a .MOV file. (My experiments led me to conclude the exported .AVI version suffers a significant degradation of the video track quality, probably because of poor video stream compression, but I've never bothered to check).

6. Open Ulead Movie Factory 2, and add the .MOV file as a movie clip (Ulead MF 2 will let you import .MOV files as movie clips whereas some other DVD authoring apps, such as DVD Complete, won't).

As long as I'm throwing out gratuitous advice based on my amateurish experimentation, I should note that I've found the best quality regular video conversion to DVD is accomplished with a different routine. I use TMPGEnc on the .AVI file captured from the digital camcorder to encode to MPEG2. Last I checked you can do MPEG2 encoding for something like 11 days with the free version of TMPGEnc, but I purchased the upgrade as soon as I saw how much better a job TMPGEnc did encoding the MPEG2 than any of the built-in encoders provided by Ulead MF2 or DVD Complete of MyDVD (the only ones I own).

Good luck...

Note to Tguyus, The "High Quality" checkbox in QT Pro is for display purposes. I don't know what compression format (or Coddec)you use when you've saved the QuickTime as a .mov but you get a number of choices - everthing from no compression to Animation Compression to Cinepak to DV to all sorts of things. Typically None is the hightest quality but no compression is applied and the file sizes are huge. Animation is the highest quality with any effect on the actual file size. I use Animation regularly for professional video work. The DV format is excellent as well and great for conversion to DVDs. With the DV format, the playback my look a bit funky on the computer but all the information required to look as good as full screen shot video is there. The QuickTime software shows a low quality display to accomodate the larger deminsions (720 x 480) of most DV movies. This is the one that the "High Quality" check box affects. If you have it checked you'll see an excellent quality image but the playback may suffer if you don't have a really fast computer. I believe QuickTime uses Cinepack compression to create .AVI files. Years ago it was a top of the line codec but it doesn't compare very well at all to the codecs of today. -----[More]---------- codec = Compressor/Decompressor = Various software formats used in compressing digital movies. They are also used to decompress the movies for playback. Both the QuickTime and .AVI movie formats support a number of different codecs. DivX is one of thepopular new codecs that can be added to both QuickTime and .AVI formats. It's not a file format by itself, and simply expandes the functionality of the respective movie formats.

"coddec" = codec hightest = highest playback my look a bit funky = playback may look a bit funky I know you might find it hard to believe after the last post but I are literate!

Here's a little advice on how to make the highest quality, smallest file size videos: Render to still frames, as you mentioned. The biggest reason for this is safety. If Poser crashes 90% through a complex avi render, you have to start again. With still frames, you just continue from where you left off. Then assemble them in any of the packages mentioned above. (I use Premiere or After Effects.) save it as an uncompressed avi or QT as a master file. Use Sorenson Squeeze to create your final compressed version. It's a fantastic app for making seriously small movie files of many types while maintining excellent qulaity. You have a lot of control over the settings. Chris

Bobosaur-- Thanks for correcting my various misimpressions. I didn't realize the "quality" parameter for the video track in QT only affected display, but then I DID admit my experimentation was amateurish. I'll have to try more experiments to see if I can get good DVD-quality video using the DV format.