I was putting the finishing touches on a Poser 6 scene that I'd spent days working on, when my computer (Mac OS 10.4.11, 2 Gig of RAM) flashed a warning to save fast I was running out of memory.  An instant later Poser crashed.  When I went to reopen the scene, it no longer showed the scene icon but the MPEG movie square icon.  I don't do movies.  I told Poser to open it but nothing shows in the document window.  The light control ball is all black and the parameter dial heading says "Face Room Actor". 

Question 1:  What did I do to make it think I was doing a movie?  How would I have known?  OR is this a case of computer malfunction?

Question 2:  Can I recover the scene?

Any one have a clue??

 Try to open the file in a text editor and see how it looks. If it looks like a Poser scene it MAY be recoverable. I don't know anythng about macs but can you change the file extension to whatever a Poser scene file have on a mac and see what happens?

I looked at the PMD with TextEdit but I have no idea what all that code means.  How can I use it to recover the scene?  I'm still asking because it just "ate" another scene.  I had just hit the save command when the warning message came up saying is was running out of memory.  Sure enough, when I checked that scene, it was now a movie, too.  Does anyone have any idea why this is happening?  Is there a limit to how many characters (including clothing) you can put in a scene?  I'm getting afraid to open any old scenes or start new ones until I can figure this out.  I need some help.

PMD files are Poser Morph Data files, but that extension is also registered as many other types of application files, including Pagemaker Data files and other unrelated things.

PMD is not your scene file, but some morphs for something that was in the scene.

Perhaps you're not aware, but Poser 6 has problems with PMD files (not all, just certain situations). Many have reported that PMD files used in conjunction with DAZ's V4 absolutely crashes Poser every time.

PMD are used because you have a preferences item selected to Use External Binary Morph Targets. If you turn that off, Poser will not make PMD files anymore.

Also, every version of Poser has Service Releases - updates that fix bugs found after release. I don't remember which SR is the latest for Poser 6, but if you don't have it installed, you're asking for trouble.

Let me see if I have this straight.  I go into Poser pref. and turn off something that mentions "binary" to stop it making PMD files.  Then I can trash all the PMD files already made.  Since the scenes were ones with two or more DAZ figures, I'll just have to limit there use and keep my fingers crossed in the future.

How do I know which version of Poser 6 I have and where to find the updates? 

Thanks for all the help.

You don't need to keep your fingers crossed in the future - everything will work right.

Menu Help/About to see what you have. If it doesn't say SR something (I think), then you have the original.

As for updates, they are all on this page:

http://my.smithmicro.com/win/poser/updates.html

Scroll down to find Poser 6 SR3.

If you're on a Mac, there's a different page.

http://my.smithmicro.com/mac/poser/updates.html

Thank you Bagginsbill.  Since I stopped the binary saving, everything has been behaving much better.  I was able to recreate one of the scenes being a little more conservative with the figures this time with no problem.  Of course, just after I did that I found two files labeled "pzsave_(title)" at the bottom of my list of scenes that were intact up to the prior save.  Live and Learn.