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.