Couldn't find an answer for this, so here goes ...

When I animate and then :Make Movie" from the render pull-down in Poser 7, the output is aliased and of very low quality. Both Flash output and AVI output. Flash is brutal and unusable in my opinion, but I expected better result from an AVI. Even if I set render settings very high, I still get grainy, sometimes choppy animations.

Can anyone shed some light on how I can get around this, or what I may be doing wrong? Are there other output settings I am not aware of?

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Lornix.

Poser's AVI and Flash outputs are troublesome at best.  The Flash is
awful, and the AVI is good with some codecs, not good with others.

The standard advice is to output to separate images (image sequence) and
then assemble the frames with a video editor.

Ah yes, I wondered about that option. Thanks for the reply. I'll give that a shot. That would certainly make it easier to import into Flash and reuse later.

Cheers.

I second rendering images sequences (tiff or png) and as Ockham said, assemble in an editor or compositing app (ie: After Effects or the like). Images sequences is the preferred way to render animation in any 3D app.

I just did a test render as a series of images as you guys suggest and it turned out waaaaaay better!

Imported into Flash and got the results I was after. Flash is nice too in that it will automatically import a series of images and put them into their own key frames and all on one layer so I don't have to sit for hours building the movie frame by frame. I can then place any other animation over top of my poser animation and have some pretty great results.

Thanks again, very much appreciated.

Glad to hear it worked out okay for you. I've done some poser to flash animations for the web, but lately I have abandoned that by converting to the final result to .flv (flash video) and load that into my swf file externally. You can still add more flash animation on top if needed, and using cue points within your movie and event listeners (in actionscript) in your swf file, you can have your swf respond to different points in the movie on cue.

That's a good solution. I was thinking that I would need to convert to flv, but I had not considered loading and triggering the way you describe. I'll have to mess around with that. Up until recently I have done everything in a linear fashion which works, but is cumbersome.

Apart from some basic button triggers and time line actions I haven't done much A.S., but I'm taking some courses at Lynda.com and I look forward to mixing the 2 mediums.

Make sure you are Rendering Final Render in FireFly and not Preview. Make Movie defaults to Preview. The AVI and Flash should both be of good quality if using Firefly.

If you don't want to export the image sequences for some reason down the road you could also export out an uncompressed avi. That should remove compression artifacts and excessive blurring they may cause. 

I have been working with flash for quite a while and it still amazes me as to what can be done.

Here's a good tutorial site for flash action script dealing mainly with video and event listeners:

http://gotoandlearn.com   Great totprial site.

Another advantage of making individual frames is if Poser crashes, you don't have to start
all over again, you just start from the last good frame and do the rest of the frames.
When you first click on Make Movie, where it says Time Span in the upper right
of the pop-up window, just put the frame you want to start with instead of 1.
Say you have 100 frames and it crashes at frame 23, put your time span start  as 23
and end as 100.

Plus if there is a problem with an individual frame or a set of frames, you can change just
those frames and replace the bad frames.  Again enter the start and end range of the
frames you want to change.  Say the bad frame are 58 through 64, Start: 58 End:64.

If you have Poser Pro, you even have the advantage of off-loading the rendering
of those individual frames to another computer using the render queue,

poser useta be so unstable that they would always say to export a sequence of tiff files so that one could resume export if poser crashed, but lately it seems o.k., hence I always save time by exporting uncompressed mov file (compression=none) in OS X.  this works up to 900 frames at least.

It's not just for reliability sake (although that's a good reason) to render to image seqs, but also versatily - you can render out separate layers and composite them in another app (like AE).
In one of my movies done in Poser, over 45 layers were separately rendered out and composited later (in Combustion) was able to use different blend modes, selective motion blur and effects easier this way.

I would render out image seqs no matter what 3D app I use, be it C4D, Maya, Poser, Vue, D|S or C7 for that reason.

I've had few problems rendering out small QTs on my Mac, but why push it when you're under a deadline!