Does anybody know what are the best (quickest) codecs to use for animating in firefly? I heard somewhere DIVX 5.0.5 produced the smallest file, so I set it up for that, but at the rate my off-line pc is producing a 26-second trial snippet of my project, it'll be tommorow afternoon or evening before it finishes. If anybody knows any faster settings I'd be very grateful.

the pro-way of animating in any renderer is to generate separate images, and assemble them into a movie-stream by a video-editor. I do so for say 20 years, Pixar does so the same, so it should work for you as well.

then you can easily try various codecs and codec-settings, without having to re-render over and over again. And it''s crash-proof as well, etcetera.

have fun.

     If the animation render crashes near the end, you've lost it all.  I'll second aRtBee;  render to PNGs, then compose them in an editor.  If rendering to PNGs and a render crashes, you merely pick up from the last finished frame, rather than going back to frame 1.

     If you have Poser Pro, jack all the computers you have into a router and network render the animation with Poser Pro's Queue Manager.

. I'll third it. As each still frame finishes rendering, it is saved as the appropriate image format; when you codec compress an animation, all the frames are saved as temp files, then put through the codec in one go. By rendering to full frames uncompressed, while they take up a lot of space, you have nearly infinite options. By using a video editor, you can create as many videos as you want with different codecs and compression schemes, and as long as you have the original stills saved, you can do it over and over. Say you go DivX. Someone likes your work, but would really love it in Quicktime. With frame render, you can create a native Qt file and avoid the mosaic artifacts you get when converting from one compressed format to another. Something else frame renders are good for is protecting your work. You can't extract original quality frames from a compressed data stream, so you can prove your ownership easier with the original frames.

The codec is not your speed issue; that takes a few seconds at the end of the render process. It's the individual frames, and what is happening in them. Lighting, transmaps, shaders, subsurface scatter, ambient occlusion, indirect lighting...these are just a few of the things that can slow a render. If you are using dynamics (cloth or hair), the time to calculate it also slows down render times. A lot. There are only two ways to speed that up. Experiment and optimize the scene to minimize render times, or throw more computers at it to spread the load out.

As seachnasaigh said, the most useful thing to have when rendering animations is a renderfarm. And it doesn't have to be the warehouse sized monsters that studios use. For hobbyists, I actually prefer the term rendergarden; we aren't trying to plow the north forty like the big boys do, we just have a few tomato vines under the window.

They truly are not hard to set up. Seachnasaigh's set up, while definitely incredible, would still fall under the heading of 'garden'. Scary as that might seem (he has pictures in his thread. Look for it). My garden is in a rack in a closet downstair now. It used to be on a printer stand in my office. I do my final renders in Vue, and the version I use comes with a 5 liscence rendercow setup. So I just started building extra computers as I could afford the hardware. They don't have to be monster machines; the ones I did were motherboard, memory, 1 HDD, power supply and case. I didn't bother with installing anything like audio drivers, and I used the onboard video. I was running Athlon X2's with a 350 watt power supply stably. I've helped others set up gardens where they got used hardware from friends, or had an old box they had replaced and were wondering what to do with the 'worthless' old box.

With that 5 node capability, I could render in 8 hours what it would have taken a single computer 40 or more to finish. Of course it only breaks down smoothly if all the computers are equivalent. Otherwise a 'weak' node may only do 6 frames in the time it takes your strongest node to do 15 or more. If your Poser version has the ability, and you have other computers either on your network or available, setting up a garden is the quickest way to cut your render times.  

(Dale B) 

Quote -   I actually prefer the term rendergarden; we aren't trying to plow the north forty like the big boys do, we just have a few tomato vines under the window. 

     Rendergarden...  I like that!   It handily conveys the smaller scale.

     By the way, I have two networks.  The Big Girls consists of the heavy-hitter workstations and the rack-mount blades.  But I also have a more modest Lil'Gals network, which is exactly that sort of collection of castoffs you describe.  The Lil'Gals network consists of my older obsolete machines, the laptops, and two refurbished HP tower workstation/servers (they have dual Xeon procs and cost $340 each).  Most of us could scrape together something like this.  And it's this collection of obsolete machines (Lil'Gals) which is doing the test render work this morning, checking materials and IDL emitters for new neighborhood buildings for Tink's Cafe'.

It suprises me that no one ever mentions procedural textures when a question like this pops up.

Or rendering skipped frames to get a good idea of what it is going to look like without rendering every frame.

Thanks guys, but I can't afford anything like that stuff. I can barely pay my rent.

Animating in Preview mode will have to do. That's quite quick, actually.

Actually, I've found that most people tend to throw away their old computers. Just let friends know that you'll take them, and a lot of the time they'll just give them to you to get rid of them.

Quote - Actually, I've found that most people tend to throw away their old computers. Just let friends know that you'll take them, and a lot of the time they'll just give them to you to get rid of them.

My friends are the WORST bunch of Luddites you've ever met. Half of them have never even touched a computer, the rest are like me, using hopelessly outdated machines that move at a snail's pace. It's an age thing (I'm 62) and a class thing (uneducated) and an economic thing (living in Cleveland Ohio, where you're lucky to have a roof over your head.)

But thanks.