Hey all - I have a question... more of a survey. How long does/would it normally take you guys to create a 5 second movie of rendered animation? I created a 150 frame clip and choose to render the whole deal... I started it last night at about 11pm, right now it's 8:30AM and 32 frames are rendered... I know it may be my computer but holy crap!!! Only 32 Frames???

I have a Mac - powerbook G4, 1ghz processor/1ghz ram - do any of you guys have specs on a better machine that would at least a little faster? I use my Mac for everything from editing movies in Final Cut Pro to iTunes and it works fine.. this rendering deal is going to be the death of it I know.

Does Poser work better with the PC?? My goal is to make about 20 short clips of CGI... at this rate I'll be finished by 2010!

Thanks!

What resolution are you rendering to?

And did you know that you can make an animation in the preview mode if you
aren't too worried about quality.  Animations made in the preview mode take
about 1 to 5 minutes, depending on the number of frames.  Also a good way
of checking to see if the animation looks the way you want it to before
spending a lot of time on a rendered animation.
Even with a rendered animation you probably don't need the quality
you would with a still image, so try reducing your quality settings
and see if that speeds it up.
Also using low res figures and smaller texture maps might speed
up your frame renders.
But to sort of answer your question, I made a 1,000 frame animation
of Vicky dancing from a BVH and it took about 8 hours with the Firefly
renderer and it turned out beautiful.

i've had a 90 hour single frame render before(50 glass steps with reflection nodes attached), so to make a 5 second animation with that ,i'd be about 456 years old by the time it finished rendering!!

tthe, check the mac forum for more info. your render times sound about right. you know what you hafta do to speed it up: either cut way back on quality (which is what they normally do) or use something else (carrara, lightwave, maya, c4d). jim burton's benchmark test for P5 have indicated that, using a PC and a Mac with similar specs, the identical pz3 file (scene) will render slightly more than twice as fast on the PC. AFAIK it's still that way for P6, but I haven't seen any benchmarks for P6 yet, to compare OS X to XP Pro. I've only seen a test comparing an intel mac to an IBM/motorola mac, and the latter rendered about twice as fast as the intel mac.

OK - good information, as far as size I left everything at default (quicktime/600x400? something like that) and set the quality to 'HIGH' - from your experiences is the quality of Poser animation still really good when you set them to medium or lower? I'd hate to waste 2 weeks rendering 5 seconds then the quality is not what I wanted.

BTW - I left it rendering when I came to work today... I hope I didn't burn my mac out!

Thanks!

yeah, I hope it didn't, either. :lol: many folks render to individual frames (e.g. tiff) but if you post a typical frame here, the experts may be able to give ya some specific tips on what to do. saving a movie in QT (with default settings) goes to an inferior codec (anything other than "no compression". the way to speed it up is not thru QT settings, but thru render settings.

I,ve made about 6... 5to 6 minute music videos now, and it does take some time, but here is something that helps me with some time giving the scenerio of scenes. Build your scene and your camera angles, etc and save it. then delete everything but the closer actor"leaving main camera where it is. then save under a new name like phase 1. Next reload the original, followed by deleting the phase1 character only leaving another portion of the original build. Now you said you had final cut... I've read a lot about it, but never used it, yet I think it will do like my Adobe After effects.. "allowing you to work in layers." bring in the backdrop, followed by your various phases to complete your video segments. Please note: Back in the days of yeaster year, clear cells layed upon more cells of animation to complete the cartoons we use to watch as kids. Kind of funny, but a lot of animation is still done this way. I hope this helps some what. Adobe premiere is also a must for me. for segment placing and music alignment to previous audio video work done in Adobe After effects/ Final cut.      Goop
ps. if you do layers for after effects, don't forget the background... I use key removal of color... built into after effects. Also turn everything up on video... antiliasing is the killer... thats what slows ya down, but ya need it. The time is worth it... the quality is bad compared. Test render without it, then without touching anything turn it on and render over the render and watch the improvement.