What is the best video codec in Poser? In terms of sheer quality, suitable for DVD movie viewing.

• Microsoft Video 1
• Cinepak Codec by Radius
• Intel 4:2:0 Video V2.50
• Intel Indeo Video R 3:2
• Intel IYUV Codec
• Microsoft RLE
• Microsoft H.263
• Intel Indeo 4.5
• Indeo Video 5.1
• Microsoft MPEG 4 Codec

Thanks for your help. Or if there is not one listed, I would like info on it.

If you are talking about making for TV viewing DVD's then you want to go with an MPEG2 codec, which is what DVD standard is (along with a 720x480 screen size). My personal favorites are Quicktime for web friendly usage, and DivX Pro 5.1.1. The DivX codec does a very good job of compression with no artifacting. Any of those are useable; it pretty much depends on what will be your viewer. The more modern codecs tend to have better compression with less loss, though.

It also depends whether you are going to be doing any work on the footage after you render it. If you are going to be adding effects and filters in some sort of video editing program, choose a codec with very little compression for the render, and then after you have added your effects save in your preferred codec. Otherwise you will lose some quality.

I side with numanoid on this, with one slight exception. If you intend to add effects and additional sound in an external editing program (such as Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas, or similar) before converting it to MPEG2 (for TV-type DVD viewing), then you might not want to compress the initial rendered animation at all. Instead, use "Full frames uncompressed." That way, you have the best possible quality going into your editor and won't be recompressing something that has already been compressed. The drawback, of course, is that "full frames uncompressed" will take a lot of disk space. If you don't have a lot to spare, then yes, go with numanoid's suggestion of compressing as little as possible.

Or, along Deecey's comments, instead of rendering the animation as an animation in Poser, export the frames as image files in psd format (or tif, jpg, if you prefer). Do your post work on the frames needed, and use an animation editor - I use Animation Shop that comes with Paint Shop Pro.

Don`t use the cinepak codec, it is not good.

Deecey - I totally agree with you. I render all my animations as "full frames uncompressed" or as .bmp still frames, then do all my effect and transition work on those formats until I am satisfied, and then I render to .mpeg2 from my video editor. My last 5 minute animation takes 40 gig in it's WIP format, lol, so space is definitely a problem. Shadownet - you shouldn't render still frames as .jpg's. You lose some quality when converting from jpg to your video codec. (unless you set your jpg compression to nothing)

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if you set the jpeg compression to 1 or 2 (or 98 - 99 depending on the system ) then the picture quality is still very good and the pictures are much smaller than bitmaps and tiffs. A strange thing about the cinepak codec, in quicktime the cinepak codec for saving animations is very good but the standard windows one is not.

Ahh, Good catch on that, numanoid. I dropped that paragraph somewhere between the brain and fingers.... :P Using an image sequence at full frames uncompressed is also the safest method to get the raw animation; if something causes the render to abort, like a lock-up or a power failure, you can simply resume, starting just after the last completed frame number. Which image format you choose depends on what you are doing. Jpeg can be fine for QT compositing, as there is -usually- little postwork done in many cases, and the smallish sizes that are web friendly tend to obscure the detail blurring in the small window aspect. Bmp and tiff are the formats usually used, and which one depends on what you intend to do. The critical difference between them is that tiff retains he alpha channel information, and any graphics program that recognizes the alpha channel will use it. This does make tiff larger even than bmp, but it gives you the alpha to do masking with. Very large hard drives and lots and lots of DVD-R's and markers are good things to have....

It really depends on the end use. If you are doing animations for broadcast quality television, or you are producing DVD for home viewing, or you are doing work for the web - all justify using a different codec. There are also issues with some codecs with rapid changes in scenery - some get it right - others leave artifacts of the previous frame. One issue for internet, or intranet use is the transfer rate required rather than the overall compression rates. I have tended to use the Cinepak codec for preliminary work and have recently started using the DivX codec.

The divx codec has (very) noticeable artifacting with dvds. Though some dvd stuff looks quite good made from divx.

I aim for animations I can play on my DVD player, so my process is as follows:

1. Create Poser PZ3 file with my figures and attached props.

2. Import the Poser PZ3 into Cinema 4D XL v7.3. For the scenery, I have separate C4D templates with any flooring, walls, light domes, skies, etc I want for the scene. Keeping the figures separate from the scenery allows me to move the animated figures within the scene (because Cinema 4D imports all the elements of the Poser PZ3 as an indivisible unit).

3. Render in Cinema 4D in PSD format. MUCH faster rendering than Poser, and better lighting effects to boot. I can usually get a 480 frame animation with several millenium figures and complex scenery in an overnight (6-8 hour) rendering run.

4. With individual frames in PSD format, I can do any editing I want (e.g., neon glow filter, increase sharpness, etc) using the batch editing capability of Photoshop.

5. Import the PSD image sequence into Quicktime Pro 6.

6. Add any audio streams as WAV files.

7. From here I have two options:

option a = save movie as a Quicktime MOV file, which can be directly imported to Ulead Movie Factory 2 for DVD creation

option b = export Quicktime movie as an AVI (no compression, million+ colors, etc); then convert AVI to MPEG2 using the best MPEG-2 converter I have found so far: TMPGENC. Then import the converted MPEG-2 file into 321 Studio's DVD X Maker.

Option b is more work, but DVD X Maker has some advantages over Ulead MF2, including ability to impose parental controls (for when you don't want your kids to see Vicky running around naked with her sword in a temple).

The one thing I have noticed is that some of the DVDs I create have a hard time playing on my laptop. They play just fine on my home DVD player, but can get laggy on the laptop. This seems odd since the laptop always plays commercial DVDs just fine and the laptop is actually an extremely powerful mobile workstation. So I'm guessing there must somehow be significantly more data associated with each frame of my Poser animations than a commercial DVD, though I would have thought the compression would have normalized that.

Anyway, that is the best strategy I've found so far, though my strategy is much much more a product of experimentation than any actual technical knowledge.

good luck... TG