Here's the deal. I've been hired to create a figure in Poser for a series of animations. These animations will be put on web pages. The content BEHIND the animation has to be visible, so the animation itself has to have a transparent background. The best way I have found to do this is as follows: Render the animation out of Poser as a series of still images. Bring the images into Photoshop, and export them as GIF89A files, with the background color made transparent. Bring these GIFs into Flash, and re-assemble them into a movie. Export this movie using Flash's Transparent Window Mode (Publish Settings dialog box). Build a table having a background image consisting of whatever screenshot I need. Position the Flash movie in this table using CSS. It's a rather complex algorithm, but it has the advantage of working. My question is, does anyone have a better way of doing this? My client wants to be able to change the screenshot from time to time, without necessarily changing the anmation -- so there is no point in putting the screenshot into a layer in Flash. Bigger file, anyway. I'm posting this in the Photoshop and Poser forums just to see what sort of response I may get from different communities. Thanks in advance, folks!

Why not use an animated gif and leave the whole Flash-part out? Another way would be to build the flash animation with an 'import movie' style thing, where the screenshot is imported from outside the file. Then your client only has to replace the screenshot with a file with the same name. But maybe I miss some important impossibilities in these ideas (could very well be possible). Good luck!

I may use an animated GIF, but I thought fo Flash first. It actually does a pretty good of compressing the Poser output... relative file sizes aren't very different. And replacing the screenshot in Flash is more than they want to deal with. I'm trying to make it as simple as possible for them. Just dumping the image into a table background seems like the easiest fix here.

Something really different is Poser ProPack which renders Flash Output directly (vectors instead of pixels), but that is another look.

I don't think vectors would satisfy the client, but that's interesting anyway. I'll take a look at it.

Have you tried exporting to Image Ready? It does animations really well and compresses the file. Just load each image on a separate layer and it will sequence through them at whatever frame rate you need. It will also output an Alpha transparency channel if you need it. What file format do you eventually need this animation in? If you are doing GIF's, unless the resolution is very small, the file size will be massive and take forever to download. I suggest you go back to your client and tell him he should listen to people who know what they are talking about. (Thats why he employed you). Vectors are a far more web-friendly, lightweight format for web animation. You might want to also have a look at Swift3D from Electric Rain.