I noticed that when you render a scene in Poser which has hi-res textures it looks great. But when you make a movie, the result is only a little better than the preview. Why is this and how can I create a movie using the hi-res textures. Basically when I render an AVI movie I want it to look as good as the still rendered scenes. Thanks, Jeff

Umm, could be you're compressing out the detail. Have you tried full frames uncompressed. Might also be the physical size of the movie, try a render at the same dimensions as the movie and compare. Due to the movement, our eyes don't always pick up the detail available. Lots of variables here....

Yes, it definitely sounds like a compression issue. For final renders, always go full-size, uncompressed frames. You might even want to render the movie as still image sequence instead of AVI, then bring the stills into your video editor. Any compression should be done from the video editor. Play around with the dpi as well to get a good mix between quality and speed of rendering.

Just go to animation setup, make the animation 800 x 600, 24 fps, then render. and choose full frames uncompressed. That will definitely give you high res.. If your system can't keep up with it try a lower res... ex 640 x 480 with some compression... but leave the quality close to 100%. Nick

If you don`t want to go the uncompressed route you might also consider improving your codecs. I noticed that any new video codecs added came up in the list for use in Poser, and just added the DIVX one which worked well.

I have been playing around with a new logo idea in Poser that rotates and is a box with all side with the logo on. I used full frame uncompressed and the size 720 / 480 which is the size that Pinnacle system Pro one requires and the quality is good. The only real problem that I have run into is the Cast shadows works too hard and too dark!...and the antialiasing doesn't do the quality of Lightwave or 3d Max.

Are you turning on "full rendered" mode in the Animations? By default, all animation renders are in display mode. A good way to tell if you've got the right mode turned on is if the render is quick or slow (he he he)... As for compression... I have, for the most part been doing renders in "uncompressed" AVI, editing them in Premier and letting Premiere do the compression. I found this avoids a lot of problems, as long as you have the disk space. Lou

It is all about Compression. Do not compress in Poser. You don't want to be compressing 2x. I would recommend Final Cut Pro for editing, better compression if you are on a mac. Also tell it no on skipping frames.

Yes, you should skip the compression; in fact, you should skip doing the movie in Poser altogether. I usually output my movies as single images and then put them together in GIFAnimator by Ulead. It's inexpensive (approx. $50) and, despite the name, will actually let you create MPEGs, AVIs, MOV, and Flash animations. You can also specify the frame rate so you can slow down your 30 fps animation or speed it up if you want. Neat little program.

I compress to Huffyuv. It's a lossless compression scheme, so there's no loss of image quality, even during editing. And it supports Poser's alpha channel. After I'm done in postproduction, I recompress with a lossy codec like DivX, or convert to MPEG.

how do you get an alpha channel in poser?

It's there automatically in the render, whereever you see the background. You might need to set your desktop to 32-bit colour for it to work. Some image and video formats support the alpha channel: TIFF, PNG, and PSD for images; Full Frames (uncompressed), Huffyuv, and maybe Indeo for video. Utilities like Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, and Adobe Premiere can use the alpha channel as a mask. It's perfect for overlays, composites, etc.