Hi,

My apologies if this question has been answered elsewhere in the forum; however, when I did search the poser forum I was unable to find specific answers.  My question has two parts:

(1) What is the best movie format to save poser animations, or is it better to save animations as individual images and assemble into a movie using third party software?

(2)  For playback purposes, does setting the rendering size in dimensions divisible by 8 (bits), i.e. 480 X 640, 512 X 512, etc..., improve playback performance?

To help tailor people's responses, it might be helpful to know specifically what I am doing with regards to poser animation.  I have been making scientific movies in poser to show DNA and proteins interactions in 3D.  The problem is that my final movie files are enormous and playback poorly, sometimes appearing choppy.  Part of the problem lies in the fact that I have embedded the movies into powerpoint presentations.  So I was wondering what I could do to improve the quality of the movie playback and if one format is better than another, etc...

Thanks,
Christof

(1) Save as images and assemble.  Three advantages - you can stop anytime for editing or whatever, in the case of a catastrophe you can just start from the last completed frame, and you can always change the video format with this 'raw' data as input.

(2) Unsure.

Playback of video depends more on the format, the configuration, and the codec (and its configuration).  AVI is good as a source for other formats if left uncompressed.  MOV is a very good and widely used format.  Flash is used for internet often.  Many people use DivX codec.  The final video format will depend on where it will be played or what medium.  For instance, for DVD it has to be in MPG format (VBR) - which is a lossy format.  Know nothing of video in PowerPoint.

in regard to answer 2, it doesn't matter what size, if they are only gonna be played on computers. what matters is the bit-rate, in terms of choppy playback on slow machines, or with poorly-designed OS that make excessive use of virtual memory. the one they often use to cut down the bit-rate and still get something that isn't too pixellated is divx, but there may be an hundred competing codecs by now FAIK, each one having its adherents as to why it's superior. the one they use on commercial dvds is sometimes called mpeg-2, and it uses vob files as a way to compress about an hour of video onto 2 GB of disk space. in that case, the pixel size of the frame does matter, but then it's for playback on non-computers.

I don't know anything directly about PPT, but some tips forums suggest
that Powerpoint is happiest with the WMV (also called ASF) format.

WMV is easy to assemble from images by using the MovieMaker
application that comes with Windows. 

As for question #2, many codecs don't like dimensions that are not divisible by 8. Often they will encode, but playback can be choppy (if you're lucky) or downright crashes the player.

As for what codec to use, DivX is well supported on a large range of devices. WMV delivers better image quality, especially at lower bitrates, but it only plays on Windows machines.
MPEG-2 uses high bitrates and is the codec used for DVD video. If you're planning to make those animations available as a DVD movie, MPEG-2 is the way to go. The standard resolution for DVD is 720x576 pixels AFAIK (got to look that one up), I'd suggest using the standard DVD resolution in that case.
An important advantage of standard DVD is that it plays on just about any device.

Thanks to everyone who has replied to my e-mail query here on the Forum.  I am impressed with the speed at which I got some input.  I will try all of your suggestions to optimize my movies.

Cheers,
Christof

Hello, You can save your movies in a lossless AVI format if you use a lossless codec such as Lagarith, found here... http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html If your movies are in a lossless format you can edit them, add effects and transitions without any loss in image quality. When your opus is completed, you then convert it to a smaller, more portable format such as DivX, Xvid, wmv, etc. Of course, all this video stuff is a whole new world of learning. Yikes! Later Joe

I would render out as uncompressed avi on a windows system...you have no compression and no folder full of individual frames. You can then edit and compress to your hearts content in your favourite video app.

Cheers

Just my 2 cents -

From Poser you should render an uncompressed AVI , which is not the final product but the intermediate format you use as source material for your encoder or video editor. Uncompressed AVI is essentially the same thing as rendering individual stills, it just packages them in a single file. Many video programs can handle the stills, but they can ALL handle an AVI.

If your Powerpoint will be used only (or primarily) on Windows, then you should look into the Windows Media Encoder, which is a free download from Microsoft. Use it to convert your uncompressed AVI to a compressed WMV file for embedding in Powepoint. It produces very good quality files at small sizes/bitrates.

Another option is to compress the video to x-platform Flash video, which can also play back inside a Powerpoint. Flash is geared to web delivery, but it's not limited to that - it's a good general purpose video platform for local playback as well. Turbine Video Encoder is a free FLV compressor that doesn't require you to buy Flash. (Scroll to the bottom of the linked page for the free version download.) You might also find something on osflash.org, the open source Flash resource. (The SWFTOOLS package listed there has an AVI2SWF converter if you don't mind using command-line software.)

Quicktime is another option, but you must pay for Quicktime Pro to use it. However, at about $30 it's a bargain if you are going to be showing on both PC and Mac, and the quality is generally better than Flash video.

If you have a video editor program, it may natively support one or more of these formats. For example, I have Sony Movie Studio and it has a licensed Quicktime encoder that lets me create MOV files even though I don't have Quicktime Pro.

Good luck!

Although I agree completely with an uncompressed AVI format as a base, I'll just reinterate that in any event that something happens to stop the render before completion, you are screwed and must restart the render process from the beginning.  Let's say you have a 1000 frame animation to render and each frame averages five minutes to render.  That's 3.46 days of rendering.  And then at frame 998:

The electricity cuts out (and you don't have an APS backup).
The electricity cuts out and you have one, but the animation will never complete before it shutdowns as well.
The computer crashes.
Poser crashes.
Harddisk crashes.
Out of memory error.

Put aside another 3.45 days to start all over again.  I've done enough animation to have seen enough to like all of that space occupied for the still frames - because I didn't have to render the animation two or three times (or more).  Once you convert the still frames into an uncompressed AVI, they can be deleted (or archived).

Do you feel lucky, punk?  Well, do ya? ;()

I have noticed that in Poser 7 (if not previous versions) the rendering a movie slows down dramatically as it approaches that last 10-20 percent of the frames. So yeah, dying at the end might be a risk. And yes, while it is always safer to render and export one frame at a time, that in itself is (from my personal experience) brutally painstaking and requiring lots of attention. Poser 7 on a multi-processor machine with plenty of RAM has taken a lot of the fear out of using the "make movie" feature, even as it has also made rendering and exporting frame-by-frame faster as well. I still prefer to produce the different layers (foreground, middle distance and static props, background) of a Poser video composition as separate movies, and then combine them in a video edtor (Final Cut Pro in my case). The rendering is much faster and it allows me to tinker with the foreground layer (usually a figure or two) separately from the background layers. That said, I still have the problem of keying out the background, and if anyone has a way of doing that more successfully, I'd love to hear it. SS

I have rendered many Poser animations directly to AVI with the DivX codec, but it's no fun to wake up the next morning to find the process failed overnight. So, per the good advice offered here by kuroyume0161 and others, I'm now rendering animations as collections of still images in PNG format, and then assembling them into video clips with Adobe Premiere Elements 1.0.

Premiere Elements is pretty good, though I've read that Version 3 is buggy, so I'm on the lookout for other editors, and other output formats besides DivX. That's why I'm intrigued by the generally positive remarks above about WMV quality, and Ockham's comment in particular that "WMV is easy to assemble from images by using the MovieMaker application that comes with Windows."

I looked around in MovieMaker and its Help file, but came up empty-handed. Can anyone describe how to import a set of sequentially-numbered images into MovieMaker?

Thanks,
Rick

Hey Skeetshooter A good way to composite video layers is to render each seperate element with the background set as ALPHA then load them into your editor as "pre-multiplied alpha". I find it to be more effective then trying to "key-out" blue or green. When you configure your codec (quicktime I'm guessing) be sure to set it to RGB + Alpha. If everything is set correctly, the background will automatically be transparent when the clip is load in. later Joe

Hey Ricky_Java Check a little program called VirtualDub http://www.virtualdub.org/index It does a whole-heck-of-a-lot, including loading number sequenced images so that you can render them to a video file. later joe