I have been enjoying Poser 7 for several months and I am now wondering about trying my hand at animation - something short that the grandkids might enjoy.  But I have no idea what packages make the most sense for a Poser user/hobbiest.

Is there a animation software package that makes use of Poser figures with a minimum of effort?

Thanks

First question, are you looking to create figure animation or render animation?
If going to create figure animation looked at Lifeforms from Credo Interactive
If going to Render animation Poser can do that with in itself as a Movie file (avi)

You don't need any additional software.  Poser can do animation as well as still renders.

 - Noel

Sorry for my ignorance, but is Poser 7 suitable for making an animated short of 2 - 3 minutes with a several characters and story line including action and dialogue? 

Or do other packages, like Cinema 4d, etc add capabilities lacking in Poser?  And if so, do I need to be concerned with compatibility?

You will want to storyboard your movie and determine the scenes required . I suggest rendering out each scene as a seperate project and use a cheap or free video editor to put them together . A typical movie has clips of maybe 10 seconds with an occasional longer scene .

You can certainly do one in poser but it will take a while .

Render at 720 x 480 for full screen tv formats.

www.videohelp.com may answer some of your questions on video formats and editing .

Other packages may have more tools for animation , such as automatic  in/out curves but Poser will do it .

lets say a two minute short, at 15 frames per second,
thats 1,800 frames to render
if each frame takes 10 minutes to render (and thats pretty fast) you have 18,000 minutes
or 300 hours of render time alone .

Quote - Sorry for my ignorance, but is Poser 7 suitable for making an animated short of 2 - 3 minutes with a several characters and story line including action and dialogue? 

Or do other packages, like Cinema 4d, etc add capabilities lacking in Poser?  And if so, do I need to be concerned with compatibility?

Poser should do quite well for a movie like that.
You can look through a number of animation on youtube, made with Poser. It's quite capable.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=poser&search_type=&aq=f

Cinema 4D and other high end software will add capabilities and flexibility, and ability to get a super customized high end look. This high end look is usually a necessity if you;re foing for broadcast quality animation.
For fun short movies, hobby movies, instruction manuals and videos and similar application where high end customizing flexibility is not make it or break it issue, poser will do great.

Also, with the amount of pre-made content, the learning curve on getting to use Poser will be a lot shorter.

If you're doing an amination for your portfolio, to help you with admission to an art and animation school or get a job in TV or movie animation, Poser may not cut it - unless you become an extraordinarily skilled user.

For quicker rendertimes, You could look into getting Carrara (from Daz3d.com) it will take your poser files natively and it renders much faster then poser, plus you can add to the scenes and tweak the poser end results if needed.

what?? ...No tips on adding & sync'ing sound yet?

I have had a lot of success with talk designer, though I do have mimic3 syncing in Poser is a little odd, as importing sound only starts on the 1st frame of the animation, there is a plug that will allow you to change this but I havn't tried it or even remember what it si called.

Aww, c'mon nance....do you really want to scare off a newbie about to dip into keyframing....? :P But since the door has been opened..... ecccoman; What software you might want or need will depend on a lot of things...main issue being just how involved you want the process to be. Poser is quite capable of doing both keyframe animation and bvh import, and rendering out video files based on whatever codecs you have installed in your OS. However, Poser uses one of the slower render engines out there....and that is not taking into account the time needed to run a simulation if you use dynamic cloth or hair. If time is no issue, then you have most of what you'll need. You will want a graphics program like Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, GIMP, etc, to allow you to do texture work (you will find skin textures that are almost what you want, and if you go with stylized characters, then you'll want to custom color them a bit to make them look less generic). What most of us who animate in Poser recommend, though, is not to attempt to render to codec in Poser (except for test renders). We prefer to render to uncompressed still images; usually .bmp, .tiff, .png, or if all the applications can do it, .psd (Photoshop layer format, so we have all the masks as separate layers). The reason is safety. When you render to codec, if something causes the render to abort, you lose the whole thing and have to start again. By rendering to stills for later assembling in an editing program, once you have a still it is safe. Poser could crash halfway through a render, and all you would have to do is look at the finished stills, find the number of the last good one, and when you restart the render, tell Poser to render from that frame to the end, instead of the whole thing again. Once you have a sequence rendered, you can burn it to disc or copy onto a backup drive, and the work is safe. This also makes it very easy to adjust things in a graphics program; if the render winds up too dark, for example, you can just import that first frame, adjust it until it's correct, then batch process all the others....which is a lot faster than re-rendering the scene. You would assemble the frames in a video editor, and -then- use installed codecs to create actual video. There are several open source and freeware editors; a google search and check at sourceforge.net will give you some good ones. I use Adobe Premiere, and if you have access I would recommend it, as you can do your editing and sound synch in that one application. If you intend to do sound of some kind, plan on getting one of the multitrack wave editing programs. Again, there are plenty of free ones. This will be neccesary if you plan on doing things like having a musical background, and then sound effects or speech over that. You can do some of this in the better video editors, but my preference is to keep the various aspects separate, so you can concentrate on one thing at a time. As you can tell, the more you try and do, the more complexity you will run into. How elaborate you finally want to be will determine what extra software and resources you need. For full blown make-it-walk-&-talk-&-make-noise, some kind of video editor, a multitrack audio editor, and a second app that supports distributed rendering and accepts Poser import (The two most commonly used being Vue and Cararra. The pro level apps like Cinema 4D, Max, Maya, XSI, etc are used as well) are about the minimum needed to get the job done efficiently....the use of a second app for rendering being mainly due to Poser having one of the least user friendly lighting systems out there, and the apps mentioned have some for of distributed rendering ability. Being able to take older PC's and networking them to make a low to no cost renderfarm really helps when creating animation of more than say, 5 minutes in length.