I'm new to this and have been playing around with the PP character 'Mick' and mimic, trying to send a brief animated message to my niece and nephew. Problems are, when I am making the movie, part way through (sometime several times), my PC starts 'ding-ing' at me until I wiggle the mouse around, which seems to correct the problem. The other problem is that yesterday, after trying to render it all out TWICE at about an hour each, Poser (or the PC) seemed to get hung up on the final frame. Eventually I clicked 'stop', and was unable to find the AVI anywhere (I have interupted the process before and found partial movies in my folder). Can anyone tell me what's going on and what I can do tofix it? I have a decent system (Dell P4, 1.4Ghz, 256 RAM) Thanks for any help. This place is new to me, but I like! I can see spending much time here in the future... K

Are you sure you have the latest service pack for PP? The dinging is really weird. How long is the animation and at what frame rate? BTW: welcome. Q

I'm not sure about the latest service pack; I'll check. The animation is 220 frames @12 fps.

OK, ready for a REAL newbie-Q?...

I used the term 'render', but now I'm not sure I used it correctly. When I 'make movie', I get a status bar sayin "Writing AVI Movie: Frame xxx" When I was playing with some smaller attempts, as soon as that was done, my media player would launch with my mini-movie. Currently I see that it has reached frame 220 (last frame) and it has been stuck there for about an hour. My task manager shows my CPU usage at 100%, but MEM usage is low. Is this normal, or am I crashed (it's running on a different computer than this; it's the only thing going). I do have some textured walls and floor going in the animation, four lights with some shadows, some camera movement. Is that the issue?

Sorry if these are dumb questions, but I'm doing my best searching the boards etc. for answers already posted. I truely do appreciate the help.

K

Well. I don't have mimic, but I assume it uses tweeners and that means more key frames. It should therefore add to the cpu load. When you test render it, it may not be antialias, so it may zip along like nothing. When you're using a quality setting, then antialias should be selected. It will take longer. I have a 1.6 ghz with 1.5G of ram. I just complicated an already complicated animation with tens of tweeners and it rendered slowly but it got out ok and played as an MPEG4. Can you try it with a different codec? Try an MPEG compression if you have it, it's much more efficient. The latest service pack is 3, I think.