Technically not a Poser question but still sort of relevant.
I've been exporting my Poser animations as jpg's and importing them into Flash to render the avi's. A hundred years or so ago, I used to do animations in Flash using imported jpg images. I seem to remember that there was a way to select a color in a jpg and make it transparent. For the life of me, my poor frazzled brain can't remember how to do that anymore and I can't seem to find anything on transparent colors in the manuals.
Can anyone tell me?

Attached Link: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/jpeg-faq/part1/section-12.html

cheers,
dr geep
;=]

Thanks, Dr Geep. I know about transparency and jpg in real life, but I know there is a way to do it in Flash because I've done it in the past.

Oops, sorry. 

That's ok, doc. I think Flash has mutated from a fairly easy-to-use animation program to a bloated behemoth that wants to be all things to all people and in the process, losing sight of it's original purpose.

not really.  Flash was only a pure animation tool as "Future Splash," and iirc, that's pre-Web.  under Macromedia, and by the time i learned it in '98, it was primarily a tool for making Web interfaces, and animation held a firm backseat to interface elements, nested timelines, and scripting.  when i first picked it up, the included help said to avoid graphic symbols because you couldn't do as much with them scripting-wise.  for about 99% of its use online, it's done nothing but get easier and more robust.

no, there was never a way to make part of a JPG transparent in Flash.  JPGs don't have alpha, and that's completely app independent. it only changes if you change the format of the image.  since Flash has always handled images as an external resource, that just isn't possible.  what you could do is something far weirder, and as far as i know, you still can.  when you break up an image on the stage, it becomes a shape whose fill is the image.  you can then eliminate any part you want.  or you can have Flash convert your images to vector and do it by color.

you could even generate a set of masking images, convert them to vector, and use them as masks.  but you can't, and couldn't since i've been using it, actually make a transparent JPG.

none of this quite matters, though.  JPGs are lossily compressed.  most useful AVIs are as well.  it's a really, really, really bad idea compress something twice and double your artifacts.  if you want to  generate a movie out of a series of images, it would be much better to make them a lossless format like TIF or PNG.  and if you want transparency, you can just have it in the generated images.

just as an FYI, you can still do the weird break up of the image on the stage (still ctrl or command B, or Modify > Break Apart).  and it's weird, imho, because image is now a texture of the shape's fill.  you can transform the texture independently of the shape using the Gradient Transform tool. 

You're  right, cobaltdreams. I never got into Flash as a website creation tool, though.
I did find my old manual for Flash 4 which was about 275 pages as opposed to my manual for MX which runs over 1200 pages in two volumes. Talk about bloat, it's as bad as my waistline.
Anyway, playing around a bit further, I found that it is the trace bitmap function I was thinking of, which changes a raster image to a vector image. Unfortunately, that function takes forever on a large image and the results, even at the optimum settings, are not really suitable for my porpoises.
By the time Flash converts a 120 image sequence, we'll have Krell Plastic Manipulators running Poser 120. So much for easy shortcuts.

i understand your wish for a simpler tool, but just because you don't want to use it doesn't make it bloat.  the reason the manuals got bigger is because the scripting got more advanced.  i've been using it since at least version 4 (i believe i remember its release), and things that had to be done in a klugy, ineffecient and incredibly complex way and were done by the bulk of people now have much simpler solutions.  for instance, blurred magnification, text effects, and scripted motion are all much easier to do, and aspects of tons of intro animations.  and frankly, the scripting support got better, too.  CS3 & 4 have much better language documentation than Flash 4 did.

but i digress.

first of all, what are you making? are you trying for HD?   because there are better tools for making video at a high resolution out of a series of bitmaps.  i only know enough video to talk about, but i can suggest a few free pieces of software.  there's an equivalent to iMovie for Windows (MovieMaker, i think) either in the OS or available on the Microsoft site, and then there's the open source Film Gimp.  i'm sure there are others.   even Photoshop and GIMP would be better at batch processing images.  Flash is optimized for vector usage, and supports video created with the Flash encoder.  if you have Photoshop, i know generating an action to batch process your images to eliminate a color and export a TIF or PNG should be easy.  i'm fairly sure it's equally easy in GIMP. 

that said, you still have the double compression problem, and color based selection can have issues (not sure what you're working with).  as i mentioned, the best way to handle this problem is  to render the series as losslessly compressed images (PNG, TIF, etc.)  with an alpha mask.   i know that may mean a lot of computer time, but it might be worth it.

I'm just using Flash to compile the image sequences that I generate in Poser and export them as avi. It does that real good. I'm just sniffing around for some shortcuts.

right.  and i'm telling you the quickest way to edit a series of images is not with Flash.  you're basically using Flash for something it supports but isn't designed for. 

the shortcut is to use another tool to do this.  not necessarily for generating AVIs, which you can still do after creating the cutouts.  but if you want to edit a series of images, Flash is just not the tool. 

It sounds like you're asking me to make my process more complicated than it needs to be by throwing another monkey into the barrel. All I can say is it works for me as far as what I need it to do. Please don't report me to the Flash police. LOL

Yeah he's that fast guy wearing the red tights. :lol:

um, ok, whatever.  i'm not talking about the "Flash police" or changing your process in general.  do what you want, but there's no even slightly efficient way to do what you asked about in Flash.  it would take about 5 to 10 minutes to do what you want in Photoshop, and then take the result in Flash and do what you normally do.  i have no clue how long it would take to re-render.  in Flash, the only solutions are time-consuming kludges at best, and that's thinking about a single image.

so you can insist on not making your process "complicated," but it's way, way, way more difficult (and incidentally, complicated) to continue on the path you're on unless you give up on transparency altogether.

wait, i take it back.  there might be a way if you were willing to avail yourself of the scripting capabilities.  i'm pretty sure (though not positive) it would be possible to write a script to change the display of the images to mask specific colors or a range of colors.  i don't know how one would do it, and i don't know if it would succeed in publishing to AVI.

though while that might be interesting and fun to do, i'd still call it time consuming and complex.  but if you could find a script like that somewhere, you might be able to offload the complexity to someone else.

Meh. I'll just stick to what I'm doing. The results are perfectly acceptable. Thanks for all the info, cobaltdream, but I just want to keep things simple.

Attached Link: http://figurines-3d.roudneff.com/flash/joyeusesfetes3.swf

leon74, may I ask what command(s) you used to create the transparent background? Thanks.

You have two solutions: export your animation in flash from poser with no background lines, ( i include a blue or green color, i don't know if it is usefull) ). You open flash,create a layer, and import your swf.

2: you export your animation in avi with a blue our green background, and no lines, then you use "after effects" only to tranform your avi on to swf. Then you open flash, and import your swf.
i hope you will succeed!

so use After Effects instead of Photoshop (i find it much harder to use, and much less likely for someone here to know, so i went with PS, but i know it's more suited to the task).  or re-render with transparency.  pretty much just what i suggested, only with a video tool instead of an image editor.

This is the flash police, put the keyboard down, and step away with your hands up! :lol:

Forgive me for being a simpleton here.

But I've been reading and following this thread, because as I will always readily admit, yeah we Poser god coordinators still have things to learn too. :lol:

But if a .png is a much better format to use anyways, (wich I don't dispute at all) it seems to me, why not just render whatever it is your doing in poser and export it as a .png with so it's on a transparency to start with, and then later import whatever background it is you want when compiling? Thats what I do. Using either photoshop or paintshop pro.

Seems to me that'd be the easier way to go as well. As I said please forgive me if thats a stupid question, but it's been sometime since I've done an animation, last one I decided to do was back in 2001-2002 somewhere in there.

Hello.
Excuse me but with after effects it takes 15 seconds to export the avi file in a transparent swf.
If you export each image  in png in poser it will take 1 hour at least (in my poor computer).

yes, but you also won't have the same quality of transparent edges, nor will you have anything of one color.  in some scenes that's OK, but in others, that's a problem.    there are a  few different variables which might make it worth it to re-render.

OK, thank you for theses informations!