Not sure if this is the best place to post this, but thought I would start here since Poser is my primary tool.

For a few months now I've been doing some animated projects. I am the kind of person who tends to learn though trial and error, and end up developing processes that tend to work for me that way.

I generally will create all of my animation frames in Poser. I've tried doing the "Make Movie" to both AVI and Flash, the results have generally been very bad. But was has worked for me is to export the frames as png files. I then import those into Flash where I might add some audio or some other manipulations, then publish the results as a Flash movie.

I just finished a new project that rather than being a looped animation of 30 frames or so, was a video with a beginning and an end, and containing around 900 frames. It was a lot of work, but satisfying and fun, and I am really happy with the end results.

However I ran into a few issues along the way. The big one was since the resulting swf was going to be very large, ended up at over 12 mb, I wanted to publish it in a regular video format. For my circumstances, a wmv file was the best option. So I would export from Flash to avi, then used another utility to convert the avi to wmv. This worked ok, but I didn't have the option of modifying the display size of the video.

The second issue was that as I neared completion of the project in Flash, I started to bring Flash to it's knees because the project had grown so large, yet it was still just a 30 second video. I could easily see myself wanting to create animations that are 2 to 3 minutes in length.

I am just curious if others who are using Poser for animation work have any suggestions or experiences they can share concerning how they go about producing the video portion. Are there other tools out there that have the editing capabilities of Flash but are perhaps geared towards larger productions? In general are there better processes than the ones I have employed?

Hello. I use Poser for both animation and still pictures. My animations are always to avi files at this point. I really haven't had a need (yet) to export to flash. If you go to the website www.geekatplay.com there are a number of free Poser tutorials. Also, www.vtc.com has a good Poser tutorial, although not free, is one of the best I have seen. I would just search the web for some other good Poser tutorials, this is how I have learned and of course trial and error as you stated is also good. I think you get the picture.

Hope this helps!

I think you want to know how to reduce the file size of your videos and how to convert your img files to a video format? What you need is a video editor software. There are alot out there but there are free ones you can use. One is Virtual Dub.

The link and the tutorial is here:

http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/tutorial/tutorial/-/?id=2055&_m=d

Quote - I think you want to know how to reduce the file size of your videos and how to convert your img files to a video format? What you need is a video editor software. There are alot out there but there are free ones you can use. One is Virtual Dub.

The link and the tutorial is here:

http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/tutorial/tutorial/-/?id=2055&_m=d

Thank you, I'll go have a look at that. In general I'm interested in any tools or techniques others might use to produce longer animations  I think Flash is excellent for the editing parts, it works very well with the use of layers and adding audio is a snap. My issues are that it has limited export ability and seems to bog down when the project reaches a certain size.

Ditto TheOwl.  If you're working toward WMV, VirtualDub will get you there directly.
The mixer I use is VideoMach from Gromada.com, which isn't free but has more
effects available.  QuickTime Pro is also a good assembler.

A semi-relevant observation: Given the fact that Youtube has become THE
universal carrier for videos, and FLV has become THE universal
medium, it seems really odd that there aren't more tools for FLV.
I haven't even found a basic cutter and paster for FLV that
works properly.

The format isn't owned by Google, as far as I know, so it's not a question
of licensing.......

Hey yo stagehand, I saw your site. I just thought maybe you would also be interested with some animation techniques I just developed. Take a look at this link and you can download a video tutorial. Its a WMV format so fosho it will play good with you. Give me a little feedback if you could in the near future for I am testing to see if my method works.

[ http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2746227

](http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2746227)

Thank Owl, I'll be working on something new in the next few days and see about giving your technique a try. I'll certainly let you know how it works out for me.

An update on my question here, I tried a couple of the tools that some had pointed out, thank you for that, while they looked like good tools they were not quite what I am looking for.

I installed the 30 day trial of After Effects and spent most of yesterday going through a lynda.com module on it. So far it appears to have just about what I am looking for. Doesn't do export directly to wmv though and the price is an issue, but its close. So I'll keep trying it. I think I'm also going to check out Sony Vegas Video and see what it can do. It's a little cheaper.

suggestion: a serious workflow standard in animation is to render your frames at the very highest resolution you can afford, and save the frames as individual files in one of various raw formats. That means NO compression whatsoever on your master frames. This is called "lossless". You also get the alpha channel and other channels to play with outside your render engine.

This workflow gives you ultimate flexibility. You have a folder sitting there, called "an image sequence" that can be read by any serious composite/postproduction software.

Your 3D software and its render engine are not going to be top flight in composite/compression/editing; that is not its prime mission and cannot be expected to perform as well as purpose-built applications designed to take an image sequence and manipulate it.

I use QuicktimePro ($29), AfterEffects ($bucks) and SwishVideo3 ($50 http://www.swishzone.com/index.php )  for post-processing. Somethimes I also use photoshop and apply a filter/effect and create and action that applies it automatically to each frame in the image sequence folder. There are others, as mentioned above, including some free ones.

Once you get into this workflow you are not likely to go back to attempting to go straight to a Flash or Quicktime or WMV or AVI clip right out of Poser.

::::: Opera :::::

P.S. I hightly reccommend SwishVideo for rendering .flv or .swf files (Flash). It is great.

Thanks for the tip ons SwishVideo Opera. Several years ago I  used the Swish product that was a replacement for Flash and thought it worked very well. I'll have to go check that out. Thank you.

Thank you for the other advice as well!

I used SwishMax and SwishVideo to create this site, without every having done any work in Flash ever before.

http://visitpaul.com

::::: Opera :::::

Very nice work!