I recently upgraded to poser 8 from 6, and found out it tends to output my jpegs differently than  I'm used to.

 i've tried changing this in render settings but haven't found anything to do that.

When  i render a series of images for an animation  I get this error when trying to assemble them

unsupported  coding (sof2 marker found)

i'm using virtua dub, but didn't have this error with poser 6 before.  any suggestions?

I usually output to Tiff or png, then convert (degrade) to jpg in my image software.

But you do raise an interesting point. Does Poser output (any format) conform to standards (is that ICC? or something like that?) or is there a way to measure that/ assess that?

I'll try that.  Before, I had to open all the images one at a time and re save them as jpg in order to use them. quite a deal when you have over 300 or so frames..

thanks for the reply :)

Irfanview can batch-convert from any 2d format to any other 2d format, fast & easy. 

Quote -  Does Poser output (any format) conform to standards (is that ICC? or something like that?)

Short answer: no.

Longer answer: what you see on your monitor determines the choices you make with lighting, shaders, node values etc. So if you have a PC the chances are that an sRGB profile would be appropriate. If you have a custom monitor profile (one that you made using a monitor calibrator or a software-only utility) you should use that.

Quote - or is there a way to measure that/ assess that?

I have a long term project to create an ICC-compliant profiling solution for 3D apps, making very slow progress at the mo.

Meanwhile, you could try my Poser version of the MacBeth Color Checker here for assessing your setup.

Brilliant stuff, CSpear... thanks for that and good luck on your project!

With respect to output image file format/protocol (rather than image colour profile, which I think cspear was referring to) Poser must surely conform to certain accepted standards.

If it didn't, our browsers would not even be able to display the images, and external apps such as Gimp, Photoshop etc. would not be able to open them.

If you're not Avalon181 on the Adobe forums then you're not the only one having a similar problem, though not necessarily with Poser.

After downloading the image they posted I tried to load it into VirtualDub. I got the same sof2 error. A bit of research reveals that the sof2 marker (FF C2 Hex) in a jpeg header indicates that it is progressive encoded. Checking in a hex editor, I did indeed find the sof2 marker. As a test, I loaded a jpg render I had into VirtualDub version 1.86 and it loaded fine. I then saved the same file in XnView and checked the 'Progressive' box. Attempting to load that image into VirtualDub now throws the sof2 error.

Looking a bit further, I found this:

"While virtualdub claims to support progressive JPG's as of 1.6, clearly it's giving you issues. I'd suggest batch processing them to baseline encoding, or maybe even just to BMP or some un-compressed form."

If your images load without error in other applications then this may be your problem. In Poser, is it possible that there is a progressive setting on jpg output that you are using?
 

It seems to only do this with the jpeg selection.  I tried it recently with png and it loaded fine in virtuadub.
If there is a progressive setting  I can't find it. I'm using the defaukt settings poser 8 has from the box.
thanks to all who posted here.

Don't render to JPEG format; I've no idea which toolkit the Poser developers used to support JPEG but I'm guessing it wasn't the most expensive one.

I learned way back with Poser 4 not to render to JPEG - the results were terrible - and I've never done so since, so I can't comment on any changes that may have been made since Poser 6.

I render animations to PNG with no problems and great quality. 

Attached Link: http://freeimage.sourceforge.net/

Good advice due to JPEG being a lossy format.
At the very least you'd want to set the quality to 100 rather than leaving it at the default.

Quote - I've no idea which toolkit the Poser developers used to support JPEG but I'm guessing it wasn't the most expensive one.

It didn't cost them anything, see attached link.
The library makes use of several other open source libraries for reading and writing well known image formats (JPEG, PNG, TIFF, EXR) which are used by many other pieces of software for the same purpose.

Bizarre. I tried loading a progressively encoded jpeg into TMPGEnc without error so apparently it's something with VirtualDub. The person on the Adobe forum wasn't using Poser but a new version of one of their products. Maybe one of the newer jpeg libraries is doing something VDub doesn't like.