I have Poser 10.0.4.27796 . I have just made my first Poser movie for a few years. From Poser 4 times, Poser when making animation has output in .AVI mode, OK, no complaint about that, and so it has been down the years.

But in today's attempt my Poser had no way to set it to output movie in .AVI mode. but now outputs in .SWF mode.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWF

My IrfanView cannot play .SWF . My useful movie-editing program VirtualDub , and my Poser 10's movie-player menu call, refuse to read .SWF but insist on needing .AVI . Please how can I make my Poser go back to what has worked for ages and output movie in .AVI ????

The new Posers offer many different export options. Have you clicked the dark triangle next to "Format"? All sorts of export options will appear, including various AVI formats.

Thanks. My Poser 10 can output .AVI in 3 modes, for the same job:-

AVI uncompressed: 256,147 Kbytes : displayed OK.

AVI DV : 18,867 Kbytes, displayed distorted (squashed to about 60% in Y)

AVI MJPEG: 62,114 Kbytes :: displayed OK.

You might consider exporting it as a series of .png frames, too. Assemble them in your video program. With .pngs you can use transparencies, and layer images over images quite easily. Also: if the export fails at some point, you'd lose the entire AVI video--but you'd keep all the frames before the failure, and could just start exporting again at that point. Good safety feature.

I'd go for png option too ..... saves time if you have a whoopise (power cut woteva)

I found that often Poser 10's display mode is adequate for movie.

I made the movie and output it to .AVI MJPEG mode.

I used VirtualDub to chain 2 segments together and add sounds.

The result is 224 frames, each 900x900, plus sounds.

VirtualDub output it as 533,513 Kbytes (over half a gigabyte)!

Is that to be expected, or is there a way to compress it,e.g. to .MPG mode?

To compress the video, download and install Divx or Xvid.  These are what I use.  There are probably other codecs out there that I don't know about.

1.  Load your video in VirtualDub

2.  Choose Video->Compression.  Select the Divx or Xvid codec.

3.  Under the Video menu, make sure Full Processing Mode is selected.

4.  Choose File->Save as AVI to save out to a compressed video.

I also like to save my animations out to an image sequence and just drag and drop the first image in the sequence (e.g. "image_000.png") into VirtualDub and the rest of the images in the sequence will be automatically loaded.  Then under Video->Frame Rate, I choose "Change frame rate to (fps)" and specify the frame rate of the animation set in Poser and I choose "Process all frames" in the Frame rate conversion section of the dialog box and then I select the compression codec and "Save as AVI".

Where can I download Xvid or Divx?

Google it.

https://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Multimedia/MPEG/DivX

and the pages that it points to, list a mass of stuff, but which is the correct codec? I have waded through such lists before when looking for codecs. And when I have downloaded it, where in my computer should I put it to install it?

This is what I found:

http://www.divxmovies.com/codec/
http://www.xvidmovies.com/codec/

Just download the installers to anywhere on your computer and run it.

xvid seems very effective :: it reduced a 900x900 bytes/frame movie file (with sound) from 533,513 Kbytes to 5967 Kbytes!

Yep  :)

This is one of the reasons the big boys render to uncompressed frames. So long as you keep those raw frames and do your compression in a video editor, you can recreate that video in any format you choose. A lot of codecs are free, a lot cost a small bit, some cost $. But the codec is installed in your OS, so you can have, say, DivX, Xvid, Quciktime Pro, and one of the MP2 and Mp4 codecs, and you can create video in each format. Doing so from umcompressed footage avoids the kinds of artifacting you tend to get when you take one video format and use a converter program (pixellation and mosaic patterning being the two most common). It also allows you to take the raw frames into an editing program like Photoshop or Gimp or PSP and apply effects or corrections. It really opens the flexibility.