I was wondering what type of media players Poser users playback their animation sequences in after rendering and what format they save in? Currently both my 3d programs Poser Propack and Vue 4 Professional are defaulted to Windows media player,but my scenes don't seem to play smoothly they just jump along.I save my scenes in AVI full frames uncompressed.Any assistance on this issue would be appreciated.arrow1

Uncompressed full frames will require a lot of bandwidth from your disk - make sure it's defragmented to start with. A drive with a faster interface will probably help, if you can afford it and your motherboard will support it. Using compression will relieve the disk, but put pressure on your processor instead.

Thanks for you reply.I have over 80 gigs of free space on my Poser drive and although not making much of a difference I have Dual Athlon 2.6 plus processors and 1.5 gig of ram and a Radeon 9700 video card.What do you mean by a drive with a faster interface? arrow1

When recording AVI files you are actually using a CODEC to do the work of storing the picture information within the AVI file. There are loads of CODECS that work with the AVI file format, some are much better than others! Microsoft's own format isn't actually particularly good - unless you are creating clips at low resolution! I personally use either XVID or HUFFYUV: http://www.dvdrhelp.com/tools?section=6#6 XVID gives good compression without losing too much quality, and HUFFYUV loses no quality (but doesn't compress as much). With your computer you should get very good results by using the XVID codec - and it's free!

I'm assuming you have your reasons for wanting to save uncompressed frames, so the codec question doesn't arise. Really, the first thing you should do is to defragment your drive - that will stop the drive having to skip from one area to another when playing back your video. The drive speed question is secondary to that, if defragmentation doesn't work. It may involve money as well... But make sure that your disk controller has the most up to date drivers installed.

Save out single images, then put them together and compress them how you want. Never save into a movie directly, you have no control over the result. Dont use strange codecs - nobody will be able to watch your movie. Use mpeg 4 this is widespread, and it gives you high compression and quality.

Use 'Media Player Classic' It is twice as fast and smooth as Windows Media Player and can play every format including Real and Quicktime. Free also ;)

I always render to images files when using Poser or Vue ... the image quality is substantially better, and if you like you can treat the frames in a graphics app (e.g. Photoshop.) Apps like Quicktime Pro or Virtual Dub make it easy to turn the image file sequence into a movie file. I use the free Zoom player (available from www.download.com) for most of my movie file viewing. When saving to .avi format, I prefer the DivX codec. (www.divx.com)

You can get Media Player Classic here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/

Note that separate versions are available for Win98 and WinXP.

I prefer the MPEG-1 format for video, myself. Most platforms can play it without installing a codec. TMPGEnc is a freeware MPEG conversion utility.