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!

Message edited on: 05/27/2004 10:10

A single GIF file can do animation as well as transparency, which would avoid the need for Flash if that's your aim. There are a variety of tools which will assemble stills into an animation for you - I use Animation Shop which comes with Paint Shop Pro, and there are various free ones to be had on the software download sites.

I render as a series of PSD's and import into Adobe After FX and then key out the alpha channel

Thanks, folks -- I may use the animated GIF solution depending on the relative file sizes. And I don't have After FX... not in my budget for this project. :-)

you don't have to use After FX. same method will work in Premiere or Final cut Pro or other similar app.

And I haven't got them, either. But thanks for the input. :-)