Hello,

I've been experimenting with the Poser Animation (Make Movie / Compression) schemes to find the optimum settings for creating an animation (.avi) to bring into Final Cut Pro, edit, then output to Television / VHS.

The problems I'm having range from:

(1) the Window Size in Poser being too small (doesn't fill the TV screen) or too large ("overshoots" the TV screen),

(2) the compression scheme being too low (poor quality image) or too high (causes dropped frames in FCP), and

(3) sometimes horrendous lengths of time to render.

For example, I've tried 640 x 480 Window Size, Microsoft Video 1 Compressor, 100% Compression Quality, NO Key Frame Every, and NO fps Data Rate. The animation stalls in FCP and gives me a dropped frame message (my MAC settings are all adjusted for optimum FCP usage).

So, I changed the above settings to 75% Compression Quality and 15 fps Data Rate but the quality was unacceptable.

And so on...

Does anyone have a suggestion for the settings I should use in Poser to get the best possible output?

1. Window Size
2. Compression:
   (a) Compressor,
   (b) Compression Quality Setting,
   (c) Key Frame Every Setting,
   (d) fps Data Rate

Thank you in advance,

Jeff Clinkenbeard

Attached Link: http://innuendo.ev.ca

In my opinion, you should always render to an uncompressed AVI file first. Then you should use a third party AVI editing program to compress it to a separate file. In this way, you can experiment with the compression settings to get the best effect. Check out a program called "video mach" on the net (search google for it

Many video cards come with hardware MPEG compression, which would give you a high quality compression without loosing FPS. This might be a good option for you to explore

In addition, the DivX codec (www.divx.com) gives really fast compression and really good quality, and it is completely a software implementaion, so no additional hardware is required

David John Fielder (Konan)
Proprietor of Innuendo Software
http://innuendo.ev.ca

Just curious but how are rendering microsoft compressed AVI's on a MAC??? since FCP is a MAC ONLY Program??

Video is 720x486.

720 x 480 or 720 x 486 are the proper sizes for NTSC broadcast quality video. I always render to the former when i do animations in Truespace. (I haven't really done any animation in poser.) As said by the other guys render to either an uncompressed series of images or an uncompressed Avi, then edit it together for final compression in your video editing software. Another great solution for video output is DV. If you have a DV video camera and a firewire card you can copy your edited video out to DV tape at 100% quality, then you are free to make whatever analog VHS or SVHS copies you need from that. DV doesn't require quite as much speed from your comp or Hard drive as analog video output does.

Thank you, Everyone! I don't really understand what I did that worked, but after reading your suggestions, I set the frame size at 720 x 486 in Poser, and set the Microsoft Video 1 compressor at 100% Quality, AND configured the Temporal Quality Ratio to 1.00. This resulted in the files being imported into FCP just fine - they played in the Viewer and Timeline with no dropped frames, and there was no noticeable increase in time to render in Poser. Thanks again for your time! Yours, Jeff Clinkenbeard