Hello

I am having trouble creating avi movies in Poser since I upgraded to Vista as an operating system (not looking for a Vista vs XP argument with this post....I'm one of the few who enjoy vista except for this problem)

bear with me as I try to describe this issue. It's like the left side of the video is for some reason showing on the right side, causing the video to look a bit like a TV that is out of sync. That's on video with just motion. On video that I have dialogue with, the video does one of two things. The entire screen goes Green, still with the left chunk on the right hand side, or it looks somewhat like someone is interfering with a TV antenna, making it jump all over the place. 

I am wondering if anyone else had this issue and how they worked around it. Right now my solution is creating the scene on my main system then moving the files to my older (very slow) system and with xp and rendering it there. This is such a time killer and I'd really like to make it all happen on one machine. 

If anyone can help that'd be great. 

(I am by no means a pro, which is why I am asking here. Cause I bet most of you are and can give me a solution :) )

Hm. That sounds like either Vista is hosing your avi by forcing some 'IP protection' into your video, your codec is broken, or the codec is imcompatible with either Vista or Poser. Ifyou are using a codec you added yourself, it could also be that it needs to be HD aware to work properly with Vista; several codecs have two versions, depending on which OS you are using. Have you tried rendering out to uncompressed frames, then assembling them in a video editor? This is usually the safest way to do an animation.

I'm with Dale B.  Render your animation using uncompressed video and see how that turns out.  Pick up one of the free compilers or use a $ video package to compress your video into MPG.

Best Wishes,
Rªnce

I havn't added any codecs to the system, I have just been using the ones supplied. Maybe I should try adding one. I usually render it as uncompressed avi. I thought about doing it by frames but I don't know a program to compile them afterwords. I'm open to suggestion :)

Attached Link: virtualdub

Edit to say I render by frame and put them to gether after. I use Vegus now,  but I did use VirtualDub when I first started.

Ok I now have an example I can share of what it is doing members.shaw.ca/wakingdream/badvid.wmv

For rendering by frames are you just adding each frame in seperatly to the video editor? I must have misunderstood as I was hoping there was a way to import all the frames at once into a editor where it reads them as 1 frame. right now when I add each image in I have to manually scale down the image to 1 frame..and when we're talking 200-300 frames that's a time killer :)

If that's what I have to do then I guess that's what I have to do...just frustrating. It should just render from Poser :(

I just tried something and I think I have narrowed down the problem in Poser. I rendered the same animation with sound and had the problem. when I cleared the sound and re did the animation it looked perfect...

So....it has to do with the audio in the video. I can get around it by clearing the sound then adding the sound file back to the video, but is there perhaps something I can do to render both sound and video without this happening?

I am rendering it full frame uncompressed. 

And thank you to the replies so far!

Just so you know, you don't have to Add one frame at a time in an app to create the animation. You can select all the frames at one time. You might want to look into the site I gave you and do some reading on the topic. It might help you in the future.

Thanks. I'll do that! I appriciate the responses. Thanks a bundle.

A-ha! An audio stream! Is is one of the stereo formats? Poser's audio coding only plays nice with the original, single channel .wav format; any other format, or the multi-channeled .wav will cause all sorts of random problems. If you are doing animation with audio, and don't want to spend for the power packages like Premiere (although a careful shopping trip to ebay can get you a nice package at a decent price), you might want to check out the Magix software line (you can google the company). They do what I call 'beginner-ware'. Their audio and video apps do what they do, and cost about what a game costs (or a fraction more), so you don't sink a lot of money into them.

Just as a follow up...I have been able to render animations without this problem as long as I don't render with the audio and add it in afterwords...

But now I have a issue when rendering some scenes, not all, where I get a "the poser executible file has stopped working" error and I lose the entire thing. Sometimes it happens 10 frames into the animation, sometimes it happens 100 frames in. 

I have tried re-installing and I am running SR2. I have tried increasing virtual memory, I have even tried rendering half the frames then going back to render the second half at a later time, this still happens. 

Any ideas? :) thanks in advance.

Hmm. That could be either the imp of the perverse, or possibly there is a figure or prop (or content provider) in common with the crashed scenes? Others have had issues with which version of the waveform format a .obj was outputted as. Back up the scenes in question and start deleting items one at a time, starting with whatever background props you have, and see if you get a good render. There could potentially be an issue with a texture as well; there are python scripts out there that set all materials to nothing, so you could do that on your test scenes, and if you get a successful render, then you have your area to search. If it still bombs, proceed to the prop deletion process.

I have he same issues going on here, I tryed new codecs, didn`t correct it, it seems to happen when sound is added.

It`s VERY annoying!

When I ran Poser 7 in XP, as soon as I hit the talk feature it would crash, now in VISTA it doesn`t work right.

Does anyone have any solutions please?

My patented screed on animating to codec..... ;) The absolutely best method to deal with this (and a host of other issues) is to -not- attempt to create a codec compressed animation straight from a rendering program. Render your animation as uncompressed frames (bmp's, tiffs or targa's...and more and more apps have .psd output, so you get the option of output in photoshop layers, which can be a godsend for postwork. Or if you have After Effects of Combustion, there is rla/rpf format...) and assemble them in a video editor. A quick search will reveal the existance of several freeware apps that work well; if you go the purchased route, the less expensive end is the Magix line of software or the Quicktime Pro application. If you want more power, either Adobe Premiere or After Effects. While this does add a stage or two to your rendering pipeline, the benefits far outweigh the cost. 1). by doing frame rendering, if something causes the render to abort, in most apps you can simply advance the frame counter to the frame just past the last good render and start from there. If you are doing codec compression as you render, and something bombs, you have to start from scratch. 2). You have uncompressed frames that you can take into a graphics program and perform work on. Say you render a scene and find that you miscalculated your amibient light levels, and things look a bit washed out (or too dark. Or there was a color level glitch. Or you get the idea....). You could import the first frame into Photoshop (or your app of choice; I still use PaintShop Pro), fiddle with it until it looks right, then batch process the rest of the frames, instead of wasting the time rendering the scene over again. 3). You have a raw source to save your butt with. Once you have those frames and are satisfied, you just burn them to disc or back them up to a safety drive. If something happens to that scene later in postwork, you have the raws to reload, instead of having to render it all over again. 4). Video editing apps tend to give you far more control over what a codec is doing. The halfway decent ones give you the options on pixel shape, screen ratio, compression rates, and a bunch of other things. And this lets you experiment with settings until you are satisfied. Don't like how one compilation turned out? Just do another one with a different codec and screen ratio. Find that your output has mosaic artifacts? Change the compression rate slightly. You can do anything regarding the final output, and still have your raw frames to start all over again if you goof. 5). It is far, far easier to add sound to uncompressed frames than it is to add them to compressed video. A lot of codecs assume that you are wanting 'television' kinds of video output, so they take some liberties to get that. One of them is 'tweening' which is filling the gaps in a video stream by averaging between two compressed frames. If you are trying to synchronize a sound effect to something, it is possible that the 'frame' you want as your sound start doesn't really exist, except mathematically. So you can get a slight timing error. It might not be noticeable....or it might be just enough to blow the whole scene ( ready example is to open Poser, import a character, set a pose at frame 0001, then go to frame 0030 and set another one, then run the animation. If you look at the animation pallete, there should only be keyframes highlighted at the first and last frames; there are no 'real' keyframes in fields 0002-0029, but since the figure has motion through that timespan, all the elements that make up keyframes are there. In animation that is called interpolation, but it is also an example of tweening, as the computer takes the values between the two keyframes and averages it 'between' all the others. If you tried to add sound in that 'tweened' timespan, you would be utterly dependant on your ability to fiddle with things until it sounded and looke right, and this is an aquired skill). 6). Post effects work is far easier with frames. Particularly if your applications support .psd layer output. You can get your alpha mask as a layer (the white on black 'light' layer that can be used to 'cut out' sections where things exist in another animation, so you can composite the two together) for example. The whole problem with codecs in general is that render applications are memory hogs. But so are codecs. And when one gets into a fight over the memory pool with the other, one or both stutter, pause, and tend to get a bit unstable. And codecs assume that they are going to have all the resources they need for the compression part of the work. And pausing a compression, or even slowing it down, can create artifacts that are impossible to get out.

Pretty much what I was trying to say, only you did a better job of it. LOL.

Quote - Just so you know, you don't have to Add one frame at a time in an app to create the animation. You can select all the frames at one time. You might want to look into the site I gave you and do some reading on the topic. It might help you in the future.

Just as a follow up to this....yes I can select all the frames at one time, but when I add them to my editing program (sony Vegas) each frame registers as 10 frames, so each image is 10 frames...this of course makes the entire animation slow beyond belief. I read through that site but couldn't find help on this. 

Is there a command or tool option I am not aware of? If I can sort this out it is going to solve so many headaches right now :)

That is strange, I don't have that problem and I use Sony Vegas. I have Adobe Premiere but it runs slow and lags bad. Vegas is fast in comparison. I use my Animation Shop 3, that I got with my PSP, for smaller animations.

=MOST= of the video editing apps that support frame import usually either have an separate option to import frames, or else a checkbox or a radio button on the file import panel to set that identifies that you are importing frames. And then you only select the very first numbered frame, and the app imports all the othered numbered frames automatically (or one of them, at least, notes the numbering, pops up a second dialog asking if you want to import all numbered stills of that file). I think I tried the 'highlight all and import' bit long ago and the editor had a major spasm (it was Premiere 5, ifrc); a 600 frame import was at 2500 frames and raging when I had to bring up the task bar and kill the app.

Thanks for all the help guys. I think I have things functioning somewhat now :)