I'm using Poser 6 with the firefly rendering style which works absolutely fine to do a still image, but for some reason when I try to do an animation I get thes stupid lines going through everything for the whole animation. I was just curious if ne one has ran into this b4 who can maybe help me. I'm not sure if my settings need fixed or what, but help would be very appriciated.

That's one I've never seen before...... 8O What OS and what codec are you attempting to use? Something is not playing right, for certainsure..... However, there is a way to get around such grief. 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, pngs, 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). 5a) Also, you can run into unexpected issues attempting to fold an audio track into a render to codec. The most common is the audio getting scrambled in with the video stream, wrecking both. There's also the fact that you have to be careful of exactly what kind of sound file you are attempting to use. Poser, for instance, only accepts the original, mono channel .wav format. Any of the stereo formats, 3:1, 5:1, 7:1, etc. not only won't work, but will cause all sorts of wierd glitches in the video. The actual audio and video editors that have sound capability are coded to handle the multitude of sound formats, and a lot more efficiently than Poser will.... 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. The -only- time I render to codec now is in preview mode, and that is just to check out how the actual animating looks.

I've seen this jail-bar thing in P6.  It never did get properly solved as far as I know.  

Dale's answer is the solution to this and to many other problems.

Consider the jailbars to be a warning sign:
Do not render to Codec or you will be imprisoned in a 
three-day-long useless render!

That happend to me once. In your display properties is it set to 32bit True Color? If not try setting it there. Animation in Poser needs to have the display settings at 32 bit to work properly. Sometimes 24bit isn't enoph. I hope this helps.

??? Hmmmmm...... I think mlb's tip needs to go into the 'FUBAR's I have seen' folder.... :P I really don't know if you should be calling Vista MEII, though, lemon. At least with WinME, you could take 98lite to it and cut most of the crapola off of it. Maybe WinME's red-headed stepchild...

Attached Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_tvmTzfOL8

I found animating with Firefly to be a complete waste of time. I do all my animation in Poser 6 with the Poser 4 renderer with anti-aliasing turned on and ignore shader trees turned off and I get excellent results every time.

Quote - ??? Hmmmmm...... I think mlb's tip needs to go into the 'FUBAR's I have seen' folder.... :P I really don't know if you should be calling Vista MEII, though, lemon. At least with WinME, you could take 98lite to it and cut most of the crapola off of it. Maybe WinME's red-headed stepchild...

LOL. By the way I haven't seen 98Lite mentioned in ages. Good point on that. :D

Quote - I found animating with Firefly to be a complete waste of time. I do all my animation in Poser 6 with the Poser 4 renderer with anti-aliasing turned on and ignore shader trees turned off and I get excellent results every time.

Wow. I love that animation.  ^_^

Thank you guys for all the help. As far as my comp it is not running in 32 bit color, I'm running Windows Me and It only goes up to 24 bit I guess as there is no 32 bit available. So I assume this is the reason why my animations are "behind bars" so to speak. Your solution sounds good dale, but I was curious If it will take a longer amount of time to put the frames all together and also If I can do this in Adobe Image Ready, I think I saw something like that in there but don't really mess with it much as I usually use Photoshop. The reason I ask abotu the time consumption is because I am currently working on a rather big.... er scratch that ... HUGE project and anything I can do to save time is very important. Thank you all soooo very much for all your help and suggestions, I'm glad this is such a very helpful community and very much appriciate it.

I haven't used Image Ready, so I can't say. There are free video editors you can find with a google search. As for time; yes and no. Rendering to frames does add another stage to your rendering pipeline, so there is some time added. But as you have your raw frames (and backed up), you won't be forced to re-render you animations if you decide or need to recompile them (at least on person I know did a college project with DivX.....and found out reading his assignment a little closer, that the prof had specified .mov. He tried the file converters, and learned how less than optimal they can be. Where if he had done frame rendering, all it would have been to fix it would be to change the codec the editor used and recompile. Instead he wound up re-rendering.) The actual compiling time varies, depending on how many frames you have, their size, and any effects the editor is having to calculate. As an example, one 440x599 32 bit color 900 frame animation took around 8 minutes to compile into a DivX .avi, so the amount of time added is pretty minimal. And if you have or can borrow another computer, you can turn one loose on rendering while using the second to compile, edit, add your audio, etc. That in itself will speed up your pipeline, as you will be 'working' on at least two things at once. And you might want to look around for an OEM of Win2k Pro; it will run on any hardware that WinME does, and will have faster response times. Although WinME does support 32 bit color, if your video card and drivers support it.

Quote - > Quote - ??? Hmmmmm...... I think mlb's tip needs to go into the 'FUBAR's I have seen' folder.... :P I really don't know if you should be calling Vista MEII, though, lemon. At least with WinME, you could take 98lite to it and cut most of the crapola off of it. Maybe WinME's red-headed stepchild...

LOL. By the way I haven't seen 98Lite mentioned in ages. Good point on that. :D

I'm still hoping that Shane Brooks can strike again with VistaLite; wouldn't it be kinky to scrape the Macy's Day Parade bullshit off and find a halfway useable OS that doesn't eat your memory pool like candy?