Hi all,

Once again I hit the wall of stump. I made a nice 135 frame animation that I had to learn several new tweaks to setup, but once I did the content was obviously too big for either of my iMacs to handle, and it crashes/stalls/freezes about frame 60 or so. So I want to save the work, but shorten the animation by cutting it in half. I thought I could do this in the animation palette by deleting the first 50 -or so- frames, and then selecting the remaining keyframes, sliding them over to replace the ones I deleted. But instead of just sliding over, they compressed, and the first keyframe stayed no matter what I did.

I can delete the latter keyframes and shorten the first part, but the second is then lost.

So how do I remove the first keyframes in an animation without affecting the rest?

Thanks

It dawned on me that I could try setting the animation 'make movie' to start at the frame i want. So I am trying that....

With your animation open (the whole thing) go to Animation--> Retime Animation and for SOURCE FRAMES put in the middle number say 60 the end frame of 135.  For the DESTINATION FRAMES put in 1 to (135-60) +1. You have to add the extra 1 because Frame 60 is part of the timeline and you don't want compress or expand the timing.  Then shorten the animation to 76 Frames which gets rid of the extra that are no longer needed. 

One other thing before doing what I said above go to the last Frame (135) and create a Keyframe for all the channels.  This will ensure the last frame is in the correct position and won't cause drifting. Also your starting frame (60).

If you're getting a crash rendering animations to a codec you may be encountering a known bug. Rendering to anything but an image sequence causes a crash on Mac. We chased the bug for months. It was resolved by the latest Mac OS update, Ventura OSX 13.0.1 resolves the issue. Seems it wasn't a Poser bug.

Anyway it's best to render to image sequences. That way if the render bombs you can just pick up where you left off. Use something like Quick Time, Premeire or the freeware Kdenlive to encode the video. You'll get better encoding quality control and less do-over frustration.

Richard60 posted at 1:23 PM Sat, 12 November 2022 - #4449032

With your animation open (the whole thing) go to Animation--> Retime Animation and for SOURCE FRAMES put in the middle number say 60 the end frame of 135.  For the DESTINATION FRAMES put in 1 to (135-60) +1. You have to add the extra 1 because Frame 60 is part of the timeline and you don't want compress or expand the timing.  Then shorten the animation to 76 Frames which gets rid of the extra that are no longer needed. 

Thank you. That is some helpful 'new' info for me. I did the workaround using the make movie frame choices (i still had to break it up, and as of today have only managed to render about half of it -many many hours-) But I will be trying this suggestion very soon.

T_the_T posted at 10:49 AM Sat, 12 November 2022 - #2974985

[...] I thought I could do this in the animation palette by deleting the first 50 -or so- frames, and then selecting the remaining keyframes, sliding them over to replace the ones I deleted.

Chiming in late here, but drag-and-drop in the animation palette never seems to give me the expected result. I don't know if that's Poser's fault or mine, to be absolutely fair. :)

I would do this purely with copy and paste:

1 - Select the second half of your animation and hit Ctrl-C to copy it.

2 - Select the first half and delete it.

3 - Select the block where you want your second half to go - this can include frame 1 if you want - hit Ctrl-V to paste

Actually I often retain frame 1 as a "home" frame that isn't included in the timeline, where everything is at zero position / pose etc. It can sometimes make things easier.

Also, full disclosure, I rarely make animations as such; but I do use the animation palette in nearly all scenes to hold a series of sequential frames that will become part of a comic strip or similar format.

EnglishBob posted at 6:43 AM Mon, 21 November 2022 - #4449743

T_the_T posted at 10:49 AM Sat, 12 November 2022 - #2974985

[...] I thought I could do this in the animation palette by deleting the first 50 -or so- frames, and then selecting the remaining keyframes, sliding them over to replace the ones I deleted.

Chiming in late here, but drag-and-drop in the animation palette never seems to give me the expected result. I don't know if that's Poser's fault or mine, to be absolutely fair. :)

I would do this purely with copy and paste:

1 - Select the second half of your animation and hit Ctrl-C to copy it.

2 - Select the first half and delete it.

3 - Select the block where you want your second half to go - this can include frame 1 if you want - hit Ctrl-V to paste

Actually I often retain frame 1 as a "home" frame that isn't included in the timeline, where everything is at zero position / pose etc. It can sometimes make things easier.

Also, full disclosure, I rarely make animations as such; but I do use the animation palette in nearly all scenes to hold a series of sequential frames that will become part of a comic strip or similar format.

I have tried this, and though I could cut/copy/paste, the initial frame#1 always stayed the same and all other keyframes compressed into a mess. I believe the best solution so far is to 'retime animation' -and what I did, which was to render the animation sequence from the frame #s =like telling a printer which pages to print. That was the simplest, unproblematic way I have found thus far. Your method would probably work if I planned the animation accordingly, and not after the fact. Live and learn.

Thanks