Hi all just a quick question regarding animation in Poser.

I have a pretty big animation in the works and I plan to split it into sections via separate pzr files (say 3500 frames) to help keep render times sensible.

I was wondering if there is a way to take a frame - say 3,500 and set it as frame number one - effectively deleting all previous frames?

I am kinda hoping poser has this ability otherwise I am going to have to pretty much recreate the scene and poses exactly every time I want to move to a new file, or set off one massive render.

Hope this makes sense

Gonzo

it would definitely be a bummer having to drag-select 3499 frames :lol:
but this question gets asked about once per month. one answer is to dupe frame 3500
(dupe all poses, positions, lites etc.)onto frame 1, then reset animation length to 1 frame.

when rendering you can specify which frames to render

1-3500 ist render
3501-7000 2nd render etc...

The_Great_Gonzo
making a series of pz3s won't make render times sensible. you still will have the overall net render time, obviously.

your comment makes me suspect you are thinking in terms of actually rendering your film in Poser. many of us, myself included, have come to think of Poser as a "frame engine"; one generates folders full of frames from various pz3s in the project. Your 'principal photography' is shot with Poser. The film itself is actually assembled and finished in software purpose-built for that, using the folder of original, lossless frame files that Poser generates. I use After Effects.

it still remains a good idea, however, to break up the project into small segments, if for no other reason that an unforunate corruption discovered in the current "master" is also found to have been unnoticed in your previous ten incremental backups. if that day ever comes and you are all in one pz3, you will weep. so breaking it up is wise.

meanwhile, it is problematic to pick an arbitrary mid-scene 'seam' and require the last frame of pz3-1 to perfectly match the first frame in pze-2. your mileage may vary, but i found this to be a disasterous policy. better to 'break' right where you know you are going to cut anyway. then, even if resuming the same action, any small variance will not be noticed.

now if you write back and say your 3500 frame scene is all one shot with no cuts intended so you must execute a seamless transition, we will fortify you with new information and upload a bottle of Tylenol for you.

::::: Opera ::::

yeah, i gotta admit that it would be nerve-wracking to try to render more than about
120 frames in one go, using FFRender/poser.  especially when everything else
renders better and faster IMVHO.  maybe the term "3500" was just an hypothetical
figure.

The 3500 was a hypothetical number (although the largest none cut section would be about a minute so thats still a lot of frames).

As always it is a case of outputting the frames into folders for each scene then assemble in FCP (although playing around with the Lagarith codec seems to gives good results but is not compatible with macs as yet) .  I am pretty sure that trying to shoot a whole continious film in one cut using Poser would propably be tatamount to suicide.  A majority of the scenes are around 300-500 frames so its not quite as bad as I may have made out.

The main problem was that I needed to seemlessly cut the action from a couple of viewpoints, each around 30 seconds, I sorted it by rendering frames 01-750 from the main camera, then 751-1550 from  a second camera and putting it together in Final Cut.  While it was not really my preferred way to work around the problem it had the desired effect.

I agree that rendering huge animations in poser is a little mad, and one day I will finally get around to buying that plug-in that lets me render in max. (Although I must admit that Glow Worm does help a lot when it comes to rendering lots of files while I am out at work or asleep).

Anyway thanks for all your helps and maybe Poser will add a feature like this is a future release, I am sure it cannot be thaht hard and would be really useful.

G

On a slightly related note of continious takes...

I had a quick look to see what the longest single take in the movies is and it seems to be a film called 'Timecode' which seems to have been shot 15 times each in a continious take http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0220100/trivia.

But also the film Serenitys opening shot is about 8 minutes continious from one steadycam and I think there is a strange Russian film that the name escapes me that was shot from one camera in one long hour and a hald take with no cuts at all (but it is supposed to be terrible)

G

Andy Warhol: "Empire"

Eight hours continuous shot of the Empire State Building.

The_Great_Gonzo I guess it is my fault for assuming your level of understanding was much lower than I thought, but in all fairness I think you led me astray a little with the wording of your first post.

I am glad you solved your problem.

Yesterday/overnight I sent Poser7 on a render of 1800 frames of one long trackin shot. 25 seconds per frame. When I got up at 7:00 AM I fouind out it had bailed out at 4:00 AM at about the half-way point. I turned it on again and it went thru to the end.

::::: Opera :::::

One of my big pet-peeves with Poser is the way it handles rendering.  Talk about cumbersome and slow! Early on, I learned that I have to save my animations as individual frames because of the render engine crashing.  Don't get me wrong, I like Poser and I think it does a lot of things really well, but rendering isn't one of them.

I have been using Vue Pro Studio 6 to render Poser scenes for about a year or so.  I have found that Vue handles Poser scenes very well, and I can use other machines to help render.  My renderfarm consist of 5 PC's (that is the license limit for the version of  Vue that I have), and I have found that not only do I drastically decrease my render times, I have far less technical issues while doing so.  Also, the lighting is much better/easier in Vue.

I still set up most of my scenes in Poser, but rendering in Vue has made life easier and improved my productivity.  I do not have any experience with Maya or 3DMAX, so I don't know how Vue rendering compares with them, but Vue Pro Studio is significantly cheaper than the other alternative, and there are no plugins that you need to buy to import Poser scenes.  Just my $.02.worth.