Hopefully this hasn't been beaten to death recently enough that I'll get flamed...

I've searched the Poser forum through 10 pages of potential hits on my search criteria, but haven't found anything that addresses this specifically.  I'm hoping someone has some new information.

When I create an animation in Poser 6, in many situations I get color banding in the video.  I'm using the Microsoft Video 1 codec to generate the output, but it happens in two other codecs I've tried.  I'm assuming it's either a compression artifact, or a color-depth issue.

In various threads that I was able to find, a number of people recommended creating a video by rendering each image one by one, and then using 3rd party tools to join the images into a video.  This seems unbelievable if it is the only soluiton; there must be a better alternative.  Or to simply render into an uncompressed video (which results in a 30 second shot being 32 Meg) and to use a 3rd-party tool to compress each segment.  This latter is an option, but only a little less ugly.

Anyone have suggestions on how to animate to a high quality, non-lossy compressed video format directly from Poser?

Rendering to seperate frames is definitely the best thing to do as it avoids exacerbating memory problems.
The longer the animation your trying to render, the more relevant this becomes, as it also allows you to render in batches (or to restart or re-render problem frames).

Rendering to frames rocks.  You can recompress to a different video format as many times as you want without having to re-render your animation.  Hard to see what would be a better alternative compared to that.

Quote - When I create an animation in Poser 6, in many situations I get color banding in the video.  I'm using the Microsoft Video 1 codec to generate the output, but it happens in two other codecs I've tried.  I'm assuming it's either a compression artifact, or a color-depth issue.

Don't use Video 1.  It wasn't a good codec even fourteen years ago, which was the last time Microsoft ever worked on it.  Video 1 only supports 16-bit colour at best, which explains the banding.

Quote - In various threads that I was able to find, a number of people recommended creating a video by rendering each image one by one, and then using 3rd party tools to join the images into a video.  This seems unbelievable if it is the only soluiton; there must be a better alternative.

You don't have to sit there, advancing manually through each frame, if that's what's concerning you.  Rendering to image sequence is an automated process; Poser will even number the images for you.  And you can easily use VirtualDub to compile PNG, BMP, or JPEG images into a video; just open the first image in the numbered sequence, and VDub will load the rest.

http://www.virtualdub.org/

Quote - Anyone have suggestions on how to animate to a high quality, non-lossy compressed video format directly from Poser?

Install the Huffyuv or Lagarith lossless codecs:

http://neuron2.net/www.math.berkeley.edu/benrg/huffyuv.html

http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html

I've tested both in Poser, and they work fine, though Huffyuv must be configured to use RGB mode.  As an added bonus, they also support Poser's alpha channel, if you plan to do any composting.

Slightly unrelated but you will see banding in stills or animation if  use a single spot light and render to an 8-bit file. You can solve this problem by dithering the image or using a 32-bit file format (don't know if this is possible in Poser).

I agree that rendering individual frames (and some advnaced cases, rendering passes) and compositing the result is the de facto method to rendering animations. Good luck.

Thanks everyone for your responses; I'll try the codecs Little_Dragon pointed out, and worse case, accept the "standard" that I've been hearing.