Hi everyone, I was wondering if the newer versions of poser can do this. I mean perhaps and animation of  the G2 people, animals, etc only. So they could be layered on top of another avi movie of moving scenery, and so on?

i/e movie in/on a movie, etc

thanks

I don't know if it can be done also with avi's, but on Mac platform you can render the animation in Quicktime format with the alpha channel (Million of colors +).
Hope this helps.

 Thanks for the tip..will give that a try :)

 You could always render as a series of stills (that's a good idea in any case because you can restart it from the last scene if it crashes or something) and save those as PSD, TIFF or PNG, all of which contains the alpha channel. Poser's usual grey background is an alpha channel by default. Whenever that's visible, it can be used as an alpha mask.

I think that if you render your animation against a white background and you have no light in the scene, you get your scene like a black silhouettes, then invert the result sequence and you'll get a alpha channel of your render. I don't try it but I think it can work.

 Thanks so much for all the tips.. The main reason I want to do this, is cut down render times of doing a competed scene. My theory is, just render the character, animation, then do an overlay using a non-linear movie editor containing the backgrounds. This would really cut down render time, and not have to sacrifice as much detail.

Perhaps even using real movie footage.

Of course plotting the character's walk or action path would still require some planning.

And why don't put the background movie like a background in poser like avi background or image sequence ?

Quote - And why don't put the background movie like a background in poser like avi background or image sequence ?

While this certainly can be done, it suffers from the problem that you can't see the background movie until it's rendered... and that makes it hard to make sure everything is placed correctly according to the background.. say you have someone walking along a road.. well as you can't see the road (on the movie) chances are you may end up walking on what is beside the road. Unless of course the background movie is shot from an absolute static place 

I can see the background in the preview mode , I use to use image sequence instead an avi file, try it.

 I guess any way you try it..it will need a lot of calculation. I did try the avi bg..and as trekkie said..you cant see it until you render.. Have not tried it as image sequence yet..but once again wont that just put the load right back on poser? Poser isn't exactly noted for being ram or render time friendly.