I just completed a ten seconds animation. The poser file is some 94 MB large, showing a V3 with lots of clothing and props in a Renderupgrade background globe. The figure hardly moves, only lots of her props and her hair etc move in the wind while the camera makes a 360 degree turn around her and finally closes in. I used the extremely realistic Renderupgrade light set with its 36 lights (looks often better than top-notch Vue or Brice renders) and rendered at 20 fps. After some 24 hours my 200 frames animation was finished. The lighting looks as realistic as in any still render I use it in. But... The resolution is still not what I had expected (do I have to go on "100%" compression for this?). However, the really annoying part is this: Throughout the animation is riddled with "white flashes" i.e. single frames that show the scene like through a heavy white cloud, sometimes so much that hardly anything can be seen but a light grey screen with just a few scetchy contours... Does anybody have an idea what went wrong here and how that can be fixed? Does Poser capitulate when it has to use 36 lights in an animation? Hard to believe actually. The lights themselves are not animated, if they work in still renders they should also work in animation frame renders, or not? Or is it the frame rate? Will this go away at 30 fps? What about doing single image animations? How do I actually put these together to an animation? Please help, the animation looked to cool to have it botched by these silly flashes. Sven

I don't have a proper answer for you, but as a general rule it's advisable to render to still images and assemble your movie afterwards. If Poser should take it into its head to crash (perish the thought...) you can start again from where you left off. In addition, things like the white flashes might be easier to diagnose and/or maybe even fix. At a high frame rate, you could afford to drop those frames altogether. It's also better to render to a non-compressed file format. That should help your resolution - but I assume you know that animation render settings need not be the same as the ones you use for stills? Are you sure that anti-aliasing is really in force? No offence intended. It might help others answering this question to know what version of Poser you are using.

Anti-aliasing is of course on. The whit flashes are the problem. I rerendered with less lights and the flashes are still there. I rendered some still images and some of them indeed have the whiteout phenomenon. Its really strange! I use Poser 4.0.3 Pro Pack, Athlon 2600++, 1 GB ram.

At 20 fps you're going to see some problems... mainly the human eye tends to react best to 22 fps and above. 24 fps is standard for motion pictures and 30 fps for television. Once you exceed 22 fps, every increase in image density will begin to affect how smoothly the animation appears to run. My advice is to run at 30 fps unless you're working on experimental techniques that are intended to cause psycho-active reactions, such subliminal splicing, color cloaking, etc. That should solve part of the issue, however... In terms of compression for an .avi, unless you have an enormous amount of detail that will be lost by your codec, there's no reason to keep pushing the compression down unless you just love huge file sizes. I have 16 sequential renders of an animation I'm working on, and without a doubt the difference between the same sequence rendered at 30% compression and at 70% compression is close to negligible. If you're pressing to DVD for television viewing, this difference will diminish even more due to the dual-scanline rendering process that television uses, which actually uses a two pass render and ghosts part of the image for a short time. The result is the very smooth motion of television.

Btw, my guess is that the white flashes are a result of your viewer (I'm guessing media player) creating jun frames in order to make the image move at the proper speed. That may, however, be completely and utterly wrong, so if someone corrects me, listen to them first.

Its not a result of my viewver either. I made some still renders from the animation and some of them became extremely foggy until the point where you can hardly see anything anymore. Any explanation?

Check the angle of the camera versus where the various lights are. If the camera plane passes through a spot at just the right distance, then all it gets is the light itself, as you have a lightsource between the camera plane and the rest of the image, effectively 'blinding' it. Also check your camera path, and see if it is clipping into the background structure. Many of those props have multiple layers, some translucent, to achieve depth effects. You definitely want to render animations as single frames, as it is so much easier to resume from where Poser choked, for whateve reason. It would also make it easier to debug your light issue, as you could examine each flawed frame. Just about any image editor (from Quicktime and Magix Video Studio at the low end, to Premiere at the high end) will open an image sequence and composit them into your choice of file format. Most of them depend on the codecs you have on your system. Softriver also has a point about the frame rate; 20fps is very non standard, and if a player has a 'default to X if framerate unrecognized' type setup, then it will try and tween the extra frames it needs to be happy. And the results can be bizarre. But check the lighting and camera path first.