Quote - With that, another question. I find that in Poser Pro when animating with AO the areas darkened by the AO tend to jump around with every frame. I don't quite know why, I think it has something to do with the fact that AO is calculated anew for each frame on a bucket by bucket basis.

That may come from the caching that is being done to accelerate AO - instead of calculating AO for every single shading point, it only calculates them at some and interpolates in others. The "irradiance caching" slider will control that ratio. For AO, setting it to 100 will make it calculate AO explicitly for every pixel, and would probably fix the interpolation artifacts you're seeing at the expense of extra render time.