I have several terrains with the shasta material applied as well as some desert settings too. I have a fly over camera that travels for a few seconds over this landscape.

The individual rendered images at 960x540 look pretty good and I've followed all the suggestions to eliminate or reduce grain.  

BUT - when rendered as an animation in another package as 24P - the "ground" looks grainy and noisy  as the camera moves over it.  This is noticible even if I step through the images frame by frame which tells me that each individual render changes something in the MATERIAL setting for that object - shifts dirt particles and detail in the render. In other words just by stepping through the images on the timeline I can see what I call graininess or noise. So I don't think it's the render within the editing package.

A single frame looks ok but when played it looks like you get all of these artifacts or noise or whatever.   It doesn't necessarily improve with larger renders either.  It seems to be the materials or the way the sun is hitting the objects - I'm not sure why. 

Originally I had some fog and that created its own issues when playing back too  - again - the individual image looks ok.

At any rate I am looking for a less noisy animation.  I know that I could render the scene and then use that as a background and then composite animated objects on top of that but then I lose a more accurate depiction of the object in the actual VUE scene with the light settings etc......oh btw - the imported Poser scenes and objects don't look grainy/noisy - just the terrains added in VUE Esprit.

Any suggestions?  This has really been a helpful forum. tks

Interesting problem. It doesn't sound like adjusting the AA would do much here. I don't have any answers but am surprised someone hasn't chimed in with a suggestion. Maybe a short example clip might help inspire a solution?

A short example would help immeasurably. We'd also need to know which Vue (4,5,6)(Esprit, Pro, Infinite, Xstream), whether or not it was the most recent official build or a new beta build, etc. If the terrains overlap, is there any sharper examples of this 'noise'? Function issues in the materials can show most where two separate bits of geometry intersect. If it is just in areas where shadows are occurring and moving due to the changes in camera/light angles, there could be several causes, none of them related. Or it could be something simple, like rendering out to -compressed- images. That usually bites everyone; they render to jpeg, and artifacting occurs due to the compression algorithm. You can set the animation render option to 'full frames Uncompressed', and turn right around and use one of the compressed format extensions and have your OS turn right around and compress it for you. More common in Windows, but it does happen, and the artifacting will drive you up the wall. What image extension did you use?

I am on Esprit 6 current build using PNGs. I see it also using uncompressed AVI.  I can correct the problem somewhat by removing all the noise bumps from the terrain. But then it doesn't look as detailed. Presently just trying to find a compromise between settings/render speed/final output. tks everyone....

I am usiing some of the existing mats like Shasta rock and desert...You should be able to recreate fairly easy.  What you get will be the "crawl" of the mat as each image tries to calculate the bump along with camera movement.....