Ive been working on a three-minute animation in Poser, using a number of camera moves and cuts. Obviously, with its 999 frame limit, I was going to have to set up a series of files, one for each cut. I was having trouble figuring out how to go from one file to another without losing my characters position, stance, morphs, et al. The manual is, natch, of no use when talking about this, and there didnt seem to be any way of deleting front-end frames from any given file. So this was the solution I came up with. I imagine it seems a little clunky, and Lord knows theres probably a far simpler way of doing it, but: First I note the characters xyz coordinates on the dials. Then I create a temp folder in my poses library and save the characters last position as a single-frame pose. Then I delete all frames except 1 and use the library pose on the character. I reset the xyz coordinates, and bingo! Im at a new starting point but with my character at the same position he was at the end of the previous one. Continuity... its a good thing... Like I said, theres probably a far easier way of doing it, so any suggestions would be appreciated.

What you are doing will indeed work but did you realise that its only the counter that only registers 999 frames? I have used animated sequences above that number.

Try this, click once in the total frames indicator. Now type in 1000 and open up the Key Frames Editor. You will see that although the top indicator says there are only 999 frames if you scroll to the right the actual number of frames is 1000.

I found that Memorize All / Restore All does the job a bit more simply. Save present PZ3, go to last frame, Memorize All, cut Frame count down to 1, then Restore All. Immediately save as new PZ3, and you have the starting frame for next 'cut'.

Phil is right that indicator only has 3 positions(999) but

I have rendered animations in poser in excess of 1700 frames in a single sequence
but your method is sound for what you are doing within poser

i often use the pose sets folder as a temporary storage for animations in progress to retrive and use later.

hey vs, the stage looks great! is it only background or actual poser render?

Actual Poser render. Frightening, isnt it... It was originally built in Bryce as an actual design for the Mobile Opera, then recreated, one import and one primitive and one light at a time, in Poser for the purposes of the animation. But if I may ask one other question to the group. In some of these sequences, I want to be able to change the specifics of some of the lights -- say, from blue to green over a three-second time frame. Now, in theory, it should simply be a matter of keyframing, but for some reason, the lights want to go from blue to blzingly intense pure white, then to green, and I cant seem to get rid of that interim white. Ive looked at possible IK problems (nothing there), possible light property problems (nothing there either). Again, the documentation is not real forthcoming on answers (Note to CL: you might consider addressing the specifics of animation a little better in v5.). Anyone have any suggestions?

The lights thing is our old friend interpolation, learn to love your graph editor, the answer's in there, check the colour dials. As to the length of the animation. Web based movies need, IMHO, to emulate TV adverts, quick and slick, short scenes telling a story succinctly. Count the seconds a typical scene lasts, well OK so maybe not film noir, but mostly the scenes are pretty short, 12 frames per second and over a thousand frames you're just going to bore people. So, Phil's absolutely right but, do you need to do this to yourself. If I need to get another scene using the same characters then I just highlight the last frame in the graph pallette and move it over to the first, wipe everything else out and move on from there. Oh, and one other tip, vary the scene's length, it can look really stupid if they're all exactly the same. I always break all of my own rules just to make sure they still work but it was the funniest gang bang I've ever done. Ah, and keep the action away from the start of the scene. Oh, I'm boring myself now, sorry.....

Hmmm, I'm relatively new at this, but why couldn't you simply copy the last frame to the first frame, delete frame 2 on... and save as a new file?

Well that's the first I've heard of that handy bit of info --Thanks PhilC! and btw, similar thing goes for all the dials, they only show three decimal places, but will accept smaller changes than thousandths of a unit.

As to the length of the animation. Web based movies need, IMHO, to emulate TV adverts, quick and slick, short scenes telling a story succinctly This is an animation of a heldentenor singing an aria by Mozart. It doesnt exactly lend itself to MTV styling. =) The lengths of the cuts vary anywhere from three to fifteen seconds: its all timed to the musical phrasing more than any sense of "story". Also, this isnt a web-based piece; its ultimately for video, as old fashioned as that technology may seem sometimes. =) But Im curious: why must web-based movies emulate something as visually cluttered as a quick-cut advert? If Im animating a scene that involves, say, an intense piece of dialogue that stretches for twenty seconds, why would I want to throw in a bunch of visually unnecessary cuts just to make it bright and shiny for the web? Could you imagine Pinter done with 1 cut every second or so? Yikes!!!! The lights thing is our old friend interpolation, learn to love your graph editor, the answer's in there, check the colour dials Unfortunately, been there, done that as well. I delete the white point, and another shows up somewhere else. Arrgghh. why couldn't you simply copy the last frame to the first frame For some reason, Poser balks at what would appear to be a sensible solution like that.

Shouldn't balk. You are using "Memorize All" and "Restore All" under the Edit pulldown?

You are using "Memorize All" and "Restore All" under the Edit pulldown? Until this thread, I never even thought to use them. Now, natch, they make sense. But I think what Gort was referring to was, as I thought would apply, copy/paste. I mean, wouldnt that make the most sense of all?

Hi What type of interpolation are you using for your lights? It sounds like you are using spline, which is Poser's default. Try changing it to linear and add a couple of extra keyframes to help control the color change. Hope this helps a little Ed

VirtualSite, it's your animation, go where you want to go.....

Not sure what you were just asking there VirtualSite, but "copy" just copies the dial values of the current object only. They are copied to the clipboard as ASCII values and can be pasted into a text document & edited btw.

Yeah, and see, I would think that if I select a frame and hit "copy", then the information in that frame would be selected and could be then pasted into any other frame: all morphs, body part positions, lights, all of it would be copied. I mean, that just seems obvious. Well, the good news is that the method described above -- memorize and restore -- works like a charm; many thanks to all. Im still having problems with the lights, but Ill get that sorted out eventually. =)

Use CUT instead of COPY!!! Works everytime for me. I can highlight any number of keyframes this way. But, as a film-maker, may I suggest you don't start each render exactly where the other left off. You'll find once you're in the "editing room" (Adobe Premiere perhaps?) you'll wish you had some additional footage around the edits. IMHO. -Tim