when I click on render the character looks amazing!  the quality is great when I animation> movie>I use all frames anti alias and all the best settings as far as I know and the output isn't NEARly as good as the render what am I doing wrong is there a way to make the animation movie look as good as the render?

render animation as series of uncompressed tiff files.

What exact settings are you using? I use render settings not the display settings. Much better quality. What codecs are you using? Could be a codec issue.

render to seperate pics, not a movie file, if program crashes, you lose 1 frame at most too
advantage of doing it this way is you can assemble the pics into a movie, and change codecs to find one you want and works good, without the need to re render, and you can "touch up" small things on a frame by frame basis, as well as set overall quality over and over

And if you have lots of images/frames to render say like a 1000+? Too much work in my opinion. I cant see rendering image by image, especially, if you have a large scene to render out.

Poser can render the entire sequence for you, automatically, assigning frame numbers to each image, in the same time it would take to render directly to AVI.  And with a utility like VirtualDub, those images can be compiled into a video in less than 30 seconds.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2691482 Here's my take on the compressed versus frame renders. You -do- add a stage or two to your rendering pipeline... But the benefits and protections you get far outweigh any minuses. I figured a link would be better than a cut and paste... :P

Another benefit to image-sequence, which I've rarely seen mentioned, is that you can preview the results while the animation is still being rendered.

I'm currently in the midst of rendering a 90-second clip, but can load the finished frames into VDub to see how it's turning out.  If I found visible flaws at any point in the sequence, I could cancel the render process, make the necessary corrections to the scene, and then resume rendering from that point, instead of discovering them after the entire animation was done.

oh that sounds GREAt! I figured out what was wrong I was rendering animations in the preview mode duh!  Then I did one in firefly and it was great!  but its taking forever so you say just to render it out as stills?  what kind of machine do you have and how long is a 90 second render at full quality?  I can't imagine though trying to keep up with that many stills how do you even select them all at once I'll google vdub and see if they have a trial.

Quote - Another benefit to image-sequence, which I've rarely seen mentioned, is that you can preview the results while the animation is still being rendered.

I'm currently in the midst of rendering a 90-second clip, but can load the finished frames into VDub to see how it's turning out.  If I found visible flaws at any point in the sequence, I could cancel the render process, make the necessary corrections to the scene, and then resume rendering from that point, instead of discovering them after the entire animation was done.

Hiya LD...

That's exactly what I do.  Just today I aborted and then restarted a 512-frame clip when I loaded a partial set of frames into VDub and noticed my light ball prop moved due to some accidental keyframes.  Will save me hours of render time.

I've often gotten the sense lately that some of my favorite techniques (most of which have come from listening to you and other Poser superstars over the years) are rarely discussed here these days.

Quote - oh that sounds GREAt! I figured out what was wrong I was rendering animations in the preview mode duh!  Then I did one in firefly and it was great!  but its taking forever so you say just to render it out as stills?

Rendering with full shaders, bump and displacement, shadows, etc. can take a while, yes.  And it'll always be longer than generating a quick hardware-accelerated preview.  But it also produces the best results.

Quote - what kind of machine do you have and how long is a 90 second render at full quality?

I have a dual-core Athlon 64 X2 3800+ with 2GB of memory.  Right now, I'm actually rendering the footage in DAZ|Studio just for the sake of variety, but my tests indicated that render-time for this scene would be almost identical in Poser.

For this particular scene (a headshot of Victoria with AprilYSH's Frizzed hairstyle and depth-mapped shadows), it's taking approximately one minute per frame at 320x240 resolution, or 60 frames per hour.  I've been rendering the footage, off and on, since late last night, and I'm currently on frame 651 of 2695.

Quote - I can't imagine though trying to keep up with that many stills how do you even select them all at once

You don't really have to manage the images.  Poser or D|S will render them all for you in sequence, and properly add a frame number to each filename.  Then in VirtualDub, you simply open the first image in the sequence, and the software automatically loads the rest for you.  Then you can play the footage, or select your compression settings and save to video.

Quote - I'll google vdub and see if they have a trial.

VirtualDub is freeware.  You can find it here:

http://www.virtualdub.org/

VDub can read PNG, BMP, TGA, and JPEG images, so if you take this approach, remember to render to one of those formats.  I prefer PNG, myself.  It uses a form of lossless compression, so there's no loss of image quality, and it'll save you a bit of hard-drive space.  Also, Poser and D|S will save PNGs with transparency, if that's important to you.

i use carrara5pro and render on a network of 2 comps =P
1st is main comp for modelling and making the scene, P4 3.0ghz with 1GB ram and majority of the harddrive space (including an external drive), 2nd comp is a core 2 Duo 2.44ghz (overclocked to 3.0ghz and extra cooling, havent had problems with stability yet, ever)

in total after that, i try to keep render time to 20 seconds average per frame, which ends up being slightly higher quality than poser has been putting out for me in the past, and without network rendering, poser6 would do the same scenes on my P4 in about 60-70 seconds per.
carrara renders same things about twice as fast as poser on average, which allows me to use higher render settings and get higher quality out of my time, then add in network render and cut down the time :)