please help. my animations are choppy. what frame rates should I be using? I leave it at 30fps (default). should I be making more frames with smaller movements? I looked at the "12 animators" clips and they look great. Im lloking for that kind of smooth movement. thanks PS I dont have P5 yet, but do have Pro Pack...

30fps is plenty, and some animators use only 15 (although I can defintely tell the difference) and it looks relatively smooth.

It could be a great number of things:

1. Video playback on your machine ... i.e. it is being animated correctly, and encoded correctly, but your machine is not playing back your animations properly. (Can you post a link so that we can see what you are talking about?)

2. Encoding of the video. Or perhaps when you have the aniamtion setup at 30fps, but on output you are choosing something different?

3) Or, an actual animation issue, such as not using enough keyframes, or more than likely, you're using all Linear(or Constant, that would definitely make it jerky) instead of mostly Spline, or combination of Spline/Linear.

Look at your animation keyframes ... are they mostly brown, mostly green, or white/grey?

It's really hard to say without seeing the animation and/or your keyframes, etc.

-Tim

yes. Im using alot of linear and constant. I thought thats what I needed to do to make smooth transitions between a number of frames, and differnt poses. You're saying not to, huh? I guess im not understanding "spline" yet. Also, I have a high-end system, so it isn't my PC. (XP 2000 CPU, Ge Force 4 128 meg Ti 4600 video, and 768 meg o' RAM). As far as the output of animations, what setting do you suggest? thanks for your help.

It really depends on what you are animating, but most of the time you want to use mostly spline or a spline/linear mix. Constant is used for when you want to hold something in place and then have it suddenly jump to another position. The Poser 4 manual does a decent job of explaining the usage of the three different (well 4, if you count break/spline) types of keyframes. I would start there, and then begin experimenting. Once you have that down, move on to the graph editor. As far as output, there is no one way to answer this. It really depends on your target medium/audience. For frame-rate I recommend 30fps, but some people will argue you can get away with 15fps. For compression, I do ZERO compression (or occasionally use Indeo 5.11 set at 100%) for the initial renders. I can always compress later to a number of formats and codecs from my editing software timeline, or MPEG encoder. I want the best quality from the initial render. Again, you can always down-sample (compress), but you can never up-sample. -Tim

timoteo1 covered most if it but one additional factor could be your resolution (the dimensions of the movie measured in pixels). Even good computers sometimes have problems playing 30 fps clips if the clips are 640 x 480. You might tray reducing the size to 320 x 240, especially while doing test renders.

tray=try