Hi, guys. I'd like to pick your collective brains here.

I'm making a showreel to present my Poser talents, and was just wondering what might be optimal settings for a PAL compatible video render; suitable resolutions, frame rates, etc.

I'd be wanting to edit everything onto a DVD eventually, but I'm certainly not looking to produce anything in High Definition or anything like that.

I'm using Poser 7 on a system with 4GB RAM.

Thanks in advance!

720 x 576 would be standard 4:3 pal resolution, 538 x 576 for 16:9...

One thing to keep in mind is quality of your output...  if you're wanting visual quality similar to something like Final Fantasy VII Advent Children then you'll be rendering for years and years in P7!!!  For preview quality your render time will improve drastically but of course visual quality will certainly suffer.  You'll need to experiment with render quality settings to find a good middle ground to time you want to spend rendering VS quality you want.

Hopefully operaguy will see this as it sounds like he's spent a lot of time figuring render times to quality and I'm sure he'll have some really great input for you.  I personally don't render in Poser at all ( I prefer Carrara 6 Pro ) and you may find an external application may be better suited for your needs.  Programs like Carrara, Vue and Cinema 4D (Max & Maya for high end) are great at handling Poser scenes**,** you need to figure in your time, $$$ (for external app) to best suit your project needs.

Hope this helps getting ya started!

Gerard
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That's great, Gerard! Certainly is a starting point...

I have Carrara 6 pro too, but haven't entered it's learning curve yet. Eeek!

The benefit of your preferred output is that you're rendering at a lower fps than ntsc, so that's a timesaver right there.  However, you are rendering to a slightly higher resolution (vs ntsc).

encoding for your target, I rec: 720 x 576 x 25fps x interlaced.  Use an mpeg2 or h.264 codec with a high bitrate probably @ 2700 kbps

Ideally, HD is best because it supports progressive display which, obviously, looks nicer and you don't have to worry about deinterlacing on the client-side.

ciao,
         G