Hello to all Poser friends,

I wonder if anyone can give me some advice regarding managing the size of animation clips in Poser. I am using Poser Pro 2010 and my clips are getting way too large. I need to break them down into smaller clips but I can not see how you would load these into Poser and then play them as a continuous unrendered sequence so that you can see how your film is progressing. It has been suggested that I might need to use other software to do this but do I need to do that? and if so what software to use?

You can get better compression (smaller file sizes) by selecting an appropriate codec. There is one that does wmv files which is quite good.  You would edit your clips together using a video editor (tmpgenC is one)(try www.videohelp) and playing back in windows media player or any one of a number of free players.

Hi

I do a lot of video in Poser it's the main reason that I use it.

Here's the way I do it.

I export the files as Full Frame Uncompressed.

If I have a really long clip (I sometimes do over 4,000 frames in a clip) I create the clip in pieces.  

Use the dialog to select frames 1 to 1,000, then 1,001 to 2,000 etc.

I use Preview Render, it would be nice to use Firefly but it just takes too long. Way too Long.  I can export 1,200 frames in about 20 minutes, not 20 hours.

I export the video at the largest size I'm ever going to use it, in my case either 1200 by 900 or 1600 by 1200.  You will see that the vidio when reduced in size for the final output looks very good.

Once the video is exported I reassemble it in Adobe Premiere Elements 9.

At this point I add sound effects, background music, special effects titles etc.

I've tried a lot of editors and I find that Adobe PE works best, and it costs less then $100.  There is a free editor that you can download for Windows but it's worth it to buy Premirere Elements.

Now to answer your question, you can't have high quality video and a small file size it just isn't possible.

Buy once you have your video created in Premiere you can export it in any format and size you want. even as DVD, or direct to YouTube.

I have exported the same video at 10 mb (the limit for my e-mail) and several gigabytes for the same movie.

If you want to try it out you can download a trial for Primiere Elements from the Adobe web site.

Mike

Here's a link toe the free trial for version 10...

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Video/Video-Editors/Adobe-Premiere-Elements.shtml

Another option is to render your video as image files and put it back together as video in VirtualDub. That way you can get high quality renders out of it, save it as .avi, and convert it later on if you want the compression smaller.

I usually render as image files at 1920x1080 (standard 16x9 resolution) at 2500dpi, so that the images are crisp and clear. Poser will automatically number the frames sequencially as it renders them. The nice thing about doing it this way is you can halt the renders and restart where you left off. And you get pretty high quality video out of it.

VirtualDub is free. Google it, as I don't have the url handy. You can set your frame rate there too. Poser renders at 30fps default (that can also be adjusted), but in VirtualDub, you can set the frame rate to anything you like, up to 30fps. I believe there are plugins available to allow you to go higer than that (say you want to do a time-lapse type scene), and if you are a programmer, you can write your own. All you have to do it put it in the program folder, and VirtualDub will find it. You can also render .avi files in VirtualDub as image files. I have done this when I wanted to put a poser character in a live action scene. One thing I did notice though, is if you use the talk designer in Poser, you have to match the frame rate, or your sip sync will be off...

Another nice feature of doing video this way is that you can do a lot of post work to the image files before rendering. This allows you to use, say, photoshop to put visual effects, chroma keying, or what have you into each frame prior. Just make sure you are rendering to .png and not .jpg. A .png file will have a transparent background, so only what you render in the scene will be there. I have used it like that to put two characters in a scene that were rendered separately to save render time, and then added a static background in later. This is also how I rendered a character into a live action video.

MikeMoss and Rokket are right.  There really isn't any way to get around using an external movie maker and it's best to have Poser output image files.  I use the free Windows Live Movie Maker and the over priced Magix Movie Edit Pro.  Magix has the ability to outpun to mpeg 4 which really decreases the size of the file.

Hi

I tried out-puting the files as individual files and putting them back together in Virtual Dub last night, and I could 't get it to maintain the lip sync.

Almost every thing I do has speech involved.

After going through Virtual dub and then recombining the video file with the sound file in Premiere it didn't sync any more.  I'm going to try it again today and see what happens.

I've often output the video from Poser and then later combined it with the sound and it always maintained perfect sync.

I don't have any problem out-puting the files as .avi files and then importing them into Premiere Elements and editing them and I'm pretty sure I can process the files using it too.  I'll give that a try today.

But the only times that I've used frames is when I wanted to do post processing in Photoshop.

So I guess you can go either way, but I'm going to do some more testing with the lip sync thing.

I do recommend that you download Premiere Elements trial and give it a try, it has some pretty high requirements from your computer so you should make sure it run well on your system before you buy it.  

The nice thing about PE is that it will out put virtually any format including flash, so there isn't really anything you can't do with it.  

You can have multiple video tracks and up to 5 sound tracks and combine them any way you want, use transparency, combine images etc. and it's very easy to use.

You can make a really professional looking movie.  You can also output you movie directly to your YouTube account. 

Mike

Mike, I have no problems with the lip sync. The biggest issue you will find there is making sure that you click on video and frame rate. Match it up to the frame rate you used in Poser

Quote - MikeMoss and Rokket are right.  There really isn't any way to get around using an external movie maker and it's best to have Poser output image files.  I use the free Windows Live Movie Maker and the over priced Magix Movie Edit Pro.  Magix has the ability to outpun to mpeg 4 which really decreases the size of the file.

I have Magix Movie Edit Pro 16HD. I use it for doing full on videos with sountracks, dialog, and transitions. Most of my animations are done with this workflow: Render the figures and any props or backgrounds that they will come into contact with or interact with. Post work done in GIMP for visual effects and static backgrounds. For moving backgrounds, I import .avi files into VirtualDub and render them as image files. I then match up the video with my renders. Finally, I take the video files, dialog if I did lip sync, and other sound effects and the music score and combine it all in Movie Edit Pro. The whole thing is then rendered to .wmv to upload to YouTube or send via email to my family.

Attached Link: Lucy Walks

If I want to have a moving background I import it into Poser as an AVI file, or add it in Premiere.

Often I just use a static background in Poser.  There are a lot of tricks you can use when you do this.

If you want your character to look like it's really in a static background, you can take forground elements of the image and crop down to them in Photoshop.

Make a transmap for them, and place them on a panel, in the foreground in Poser sizing and positioning them to cover  the same element in the background image.

Now your character can move behind elements of the image making it look as if your figure is really inside the photo.  

Some times I use a static image that is wider then the view, and move the static image across the screen, this will let your character walk in place and appear to be moving in front of the image.

The linked clip shows both of those elements, near the end the background stops moving and the figure which had been stationary starts and walks off screen.

You are only limited by your imagination, if you mess around with it you can do almost any kind of effect.

I've only been doing this for a short time and I'm having a blast.

I allways wanted to make movies, now I can.