I'm guessing this has something to do with memory, but just in case there's something within Poser that I can do about it...

First of all, I should mention that I'm a newbie's newbie.  I never put a hand to Poser or 3D modeling until about a month ago.  I know about 0.0000001% of what Poser can do.  I don't even know what G2 means.

That said, I think I'm getting pretty good at posing.  (Frankly, I don't know why anyone would buy poses and facial expressions, unless they're in a hurry.  I think that's the fun part of Poser.)  Anyway, yesterday I went to render my largest animation so far (120 frames).  Poser seemed to be doing okay.  It progressed from frame to frame, the progress bar was okay.  But when it got to frame 120,  it just sat.  The mouse pointer was the hour glass, Windows Task Manager said Poser was running.  But it didn't finish.  The AVI file wasn't created.  After about 45 minutes, I hit "cancel" on the progress bar.  That sat too.  Eventually, I just terminated the program with Task Manager.  I ended up with nothing after over an hour's worth of rendering.

Does anyone know what could have caused this?

I should mention that I'm using P6 on a laptop w/1 GB of RAM and a 1.67 GHz processor.

Any input would be appreciated.  Thanks.

users buy poses and expressions just for that reason - to save time and effort. sorry it got stuck at 120. in future, render as series of tiff images, which can be converted to video in various apps. yer computer might be underpowered, but it may have been something else as well, if there were plenty of free disk space available, and the frame size were small.

Miss Nancy:  

Thanks for the feedback.  Disk space is not a problem.  I have plenty.  I tried decreasing the frame size to almost half the original but had the same problem.  BTW I misspoke in the original post.  After rendering the last image, the mouse pointer goes back to an arrow, but I cannot use it to actually click or move anything on the screen.  It's as if it gets stuck one the last step of actually creating the avi.

Anyway, can you recommend a good app to create video from .tifs?

Thanks again.

Attached Link: VirtualDub

Thanks, EnglishBob.  I'll check it out.

You've got an interesting website, BTW.  I plan to take advantage of the tutorials.

LBT, as a newbie, I must heavily underscore Miss Nancy's "save out to tiff" comment. That will save you plenty o' frustration in the future. Many things can go wrong with the program or computer or you might just get bored from waiting. Saving to an image will at least leave you with something to look at and consider whether its worth another take, as is. On the subject of "takes". Rendering to an image you can also set it to render out every 5th frame. This is great for getting an idea how the rendered sequence will look before waiting the three days for the whole thing to render on 1's. Looking at the preview animated can be good enough for evaluating body positions or camera animation but until you see rendered frames you might not realize that your character has been covered in shadow for the last two seconds of the animation. Or some other bad thing that wouldn't catch your attention when testing the first frame. Oh, and my personal favorite: Rendering to image makes it easy to go into Photoshop (or your favorite paint program) and correct minor flaws or add effects etc. good luck

Poser has an issue sometimes where if you change windows out of poser to view something else, it can stop rendering. Doesn't always happen.

Disable screensavers too.

Helps speed renders 10-30% and fixes lots o' problems.

Thanks everyone for your comments.

Attached Link: Rendering animation to sequential image files with Poser and VirtualDub