The best, safest way it to render out as separate frames and then assemble in a video editor. The first reason to do so is safety. If rendering to frames, and your system crashes, Poser locks up, your power goes out, etc; then all you have to do is check the folder where you were storing the frames, restart and reload Poser, advance to the frame just after the last good frame, and restart the rendering from there. If you are rendering to codec and things bomb out, you have to start rendering from the very beginning.

Then there is safety point 2. Once you have those uncompressed frames, save them to a backup drive or burn them to a DVD or BRD (or all the above; no such thing as too much redundant backup), then you are effectively bullet proof. Leave those original frames unmodified, and no matter what happens or what you or someone else did to the final output, you have the originals and can repair things without having to re-render the scene.

Next is the incredible amount of control that video editor gives you. There are freeware open source editors out there. I started with Magix and moved up to Adobe Premiere, but Magix is a good, basic editor. By doing the assembling in a video editor, you get nearly an unlimited pallette of options on final output. You avoid compression artifacts that can occur due to your render app fighting with the compressor over the memory pool. If you do your compression in an editor, then you only compress things -once-; that avoids the pixellation and matrix artifacts that you get when you compress an already compressed image. If you use singles you can do avi, mpeg, and a few dozen other video out formats, and still have your original frames safely stored away (converting between formats is a coin toss at best, a disaster at worst). Frames give you a more rigid timeline to work with for adding things like scoring and sound effects, instead of using the 'By God and Guess' method of adding audio to a compressed video stream (plus say someone likes your work, but would really prefer an MP4 to an AVI. All you have to do is reload the frames, select the MP4 codec, an regenerate the video Said person is happy, you haven't damaged your originals, and you -look- a bit more professional in your workflow).

Then there are the postwork options. Say you finished your render and discovered that you messed up your color balance. With frames, you can simply take the first one into a photo editor like Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, GimP, Paint, etc, adjust the balance, then batch process the lot of them and save with a different name. Or you could decide that a certain element isn't needed, and mask and batch process it away (at least as long as it isn't moving; you'd need After Effects, Afterburner, or one of the other effects software packages....all of which takes frames as well). Plus the fact that a lot of video effects simply can not be added to a compressed video stream without some very, very expensive hardware, and even then there are limits.

 

Using uncompressed frames adds one or two software packages to your pipeline, and adds some extra time to the process.....but the amount of control, and the open ended nature of your output more than offsets that. For one project it may not matter; if you intend to animate with any significant frequency, it is worth its weight in gold, platinum, and plutonium.