Ok, this is a repeat question from me from awhile ago, but, I need to figure out how some of you are making animations in Poser some 30 to 60 seconds in length in under 2 megs (little more, little less). Little Dragon gave me a link to a free program to do this, but the link was dead and I don't remember if LD responded. One of my goals was to make a video that is 3 minutes and 50 seconds in length, but when Poser saves a 8 second walking animation test at 12 megs, this make things tough on me. Ok, the second part of my rampart of questions, when I want to fade from one seen to another, Poser doesn't seem to offer a choice to do this. Will piecing together the segments of the video in Adobe Premiere work alright, or is that the wrong program for editting a video from Poser in? I may have more questions, but any help would be awesome to lead me in the right direction.

adobe premiere or adobe after effects are both good programs to use for your fading scense, i recommend after effects personally since it works a lot like photoshop a premiere is geared more toward video aquisition and creation than video post like your talking about. As for you video size, its all a matter of what codec you are using and what resolution you are rendering at. I recommend rendering your video to full size, then using after effects to reduce the resolution to tv or dvd res (320x320 for tv, 500+ for dvd, i forget the actual res) and encode it in the mpeg 4 (divx) format to get the smallest size.

This is probably what you were looking for:
http://www.tmpgenc.net/

A new commercial version of the TMPG Encoder software has been released, but the freeware version is still available.

As darkphoenix says, the final size of your video (in megabytes) depends upon its resolution (width x height) and whatever compression you're using.

Poser defaults to no compression, so the file size can get large very quickly. I normally use a lossless compression scheme when outputting from Poser; it typically makes the files about 30-50% smaller, and it doesn't affect the quality of the image at all. After I've finished editing the videos in Premiere or some other utility, I'll compress to MPEG-1; this is a lossy compression scheme, so image quality suffers, but it can really crunch the file size.

For instance, my Sabrina dance video (timed at ~34 seconds) is about 225MB uncompressed. If I use lossless Huffyuv compression, the filesize is only 62MB (it was a simple scene, so compressed particularly well). After postwork and editing (colour correction, mostly, and adding music), I converted the video to MPEG-1, using TMPG Encoder. I set the video bitrate to 400Kbps (50 kilobytes per second) and audio to low-fidelity 64Kbps (8 kilobytes per second). This comes out to 58KB per second, or about 1.92MB for the entire 34-second video.

Remember, that one was a very simple scene (one character against a white background), so I could get away with such low settings without the resulting video being compressed into a blurry, pixelated mess. Complex scenes need higher bitrates to maintain image quality.

I want to thank you both for your help. I downloaded the freebee LD, thanks for looking out for me. ;) Darkphoenix, great food for thought, thank you again.

Quick correction - American TV uses the NTSC standards - 720 x 486 at 29.97 frames per second. DV uses 720 x 480 at 29.97 seconds. The TV and DV pixels are rectangular. Therefore, if that's really your final goal you'd render in Poser at 720 x 540 and then use After Effects (or Premiere, or Final Cup Pro or whatever), to squeeze the Poser-rendered movie into 720 x 486 (or 480).

I'm working on my first full screen Poser animation right now (been doing it in other programs for several years, though) and I'm cheating. I'm rendering it at 24 frames per second (that's what film is done at) and then I'll use the features of After Effects to convert it to 29.97 frames per second.

When I'm rendering strictly for computer use I use 30 FPS or 24 FPS and then when I compress it (usually using some form of QuickTime) I change it to 15 or 12 FPS respectively.

European TV uses PAL specs - I believe they're at 25 FPS but I'm not sure.

Knocking it down from 30 FPS to 15 (or from 24 to 12) obviously reduces file size. Making the audio mono instead of stereo helps too. Backgrounds that don't change (static shots), using cuts instead of dissolves or fades, few moving items on screen, all of those help.

Some compressors do different types of images better than others, too. I have no problems using the QuickTime Sorenson compression for live action but I'm not pleased with how it's handled my animation.

Make your original render as good as you can, that one usually takes the longest. Then you can test various compression schemes and compare quality vs. size.

Since I include original music in my animations, I sacrifice some file size for audio quality (if my web-based animations have an impact on my career, I want to work at a place that can afford broadband so this kind of acts as a filter). On the other hand, when I do things for clients I often compress at different sizes and even formats so they can offer the video to the broadest spectrum of viewers. I don't have much server space yet or I'd do several versions for my self.

Whoa! Listen to that Bobasaur roar! Go Bob Go! :) Thanks for the tip. I'll definitely put it to good use.

Actually, little_dragons' Sabrina is more cool than a bunch of dimensions.

Poser uses an RGB (Red-Green-Blue) colourspace, but the Huffyuv codec defaults to YUV (Luminance-Chrominance). Fortunately, you can set Huffyuv to use RGB. Just select Huffyuv as your compressor and click the Configure button. You'll get the dialogue panel shown above. For Poser work, make sure you have the "Always suggest RGB format for output" option enabled.

If you also checkmark the "Enable RGBA (RGB with alpha) compression", the resulting video will include Poser's alpha channel, perfect for working with composites or mattes.

Well that still wasn't it I think it has something to do with Windows moviemaker that comes built in to XP I've tried everything I can think of but it still onlt lets me use the Full(uncompressed) option or the microsoft video1 option...I did get Indeo IYUV compression to work but all I got were a bunch of vertical lines....anyway thanks for responding