Hi everyone, I got me a hum dinger of a problem...I'm trying to create an intro for my website using poser and mimic, then importing into flash mx so it will be viewable. My problem is that flash only goes at a frame rate of 12 frames per second for the web, while poser and mimic are running at 30fps. When I slow mimic and poser down to 12fps the resulting animation is a joke. The frame rate is so slow that it looks like the character is having a spastic fit, not introducing a site. Any ideas on how I can slow mimic and poser down to 12 frames per second, so I can keep the voice files and the animation files running at the same rate? I've tried making the anim. an avi, but it comes out pixelated and crappy looking, as well as slow as sludge. Anyone got any ideas?!? Thanks a million!!!

Spyder97526, First off, Flash MX is not confined to 12 fps. You can alter it in the Modify menu. Go to Modify>Document. You can change the frame rate in the newly opened window. Concerning the pixelated and crappy looking AVI that's as slow as sludge: This might have to do with the codec, and it's settings, you are using for the compression. Good Luck

I have DW MX (with flash) and P5. I tried an animation in avi, came out fine on that format. Tried to render in flash and it slowed P5 to a crawl. After a half hour I had one highly pixelized unrecognizable frame done. Hope this gets fixed in the patch.

You can change your frame rate in Poser by opening up the timeline and clicking on the downward pointing arrow on the upper left corner next to the word "Rate." That will slow your animation down. Next, you need to go to "Retime Animation" under the Animation menu. You're going to have to do a little math here. You're going to have to convert the number of frames the original 30 fps animation used into an equivalent number of frames at 12 fps. --For example, if the 30 fps animation was 10 seconds long, it used 300 frames (frames 1 through 300). An equivalent 10 second animation at 12 fps would use 120 frames (frames 1 through 120) To retime this, you'd enter 1 and 300 into the "Start" and "End" frames (respectively) of the "Source Frames" (in the Retime Animation dialog). You'd enter 1 and 120 into the "Start" and "End" frames (respectively) of the "Destination Frames" Click OK and Poser will squeeze all the keyframes that were in frames 1 through 300 (the Sourcce Frames) into frames 1 through 120 (the Destination Frames). Voila! you have a 10 second animation again. I don't know what version of Poser you're using but this can be found under "Retime Keyframes," p.223 of the Poser 4 manual. FWIW, although the frame rate in Flash can be changed, 12 fps is optimal for smooth playback across the broadest spectrum of machines. Bobasaur (I was 7 of 12)

I haven't installed Mimic on this machine but if I remember right Mimic defaults to 12 fps. Which was one of the reasons I changed to 12 fps from (an incredibly mean) 10 fps for web based stuff. Typically, people want vectorised movies from the Flash exporter so the lighting colours, models etc have to have very careful consideration paid to them for your movie to shine. There is very little point in exporting more than 4 or 5 colours, the resulting file size will be astronomical if you go higher. You can go another route and use imported bitmaps or in MX a direct import of the movie (but lose some frame functionality) A bitmap sequence will work well and can be compressed well with third party apps (senility's creeping in, can't remember it's name right now) But I suspect that the originator's already found out most of this....

WEll all, heres what I have fixed so far. As far as I know, I need to preload the intor movie, otherwise it gets bogged down on the first load of the scene. All it took was acceleration the frams number the original move was inted for and it solved most of my problems! the sound was at 12fps, the movie was at 30. I turned the movie up to 42 and the frames actually match up lol, dont ask me how that was done! Heres a sample of the movie if you want to take a look at it: http://www.s-and-mwebworks.com/siteintro.html More flash and poser goodies will be added as time and skill goes along. Thanks for your help everyone!

and sorry bout my typing herer, I'm on muscle relaxers lol

I checked it out and unfortunately I didn't get anything. I looked at your source code and noticed that it referred to something called "site intro.swf" but there was no path to the file. That may have been the problem. I also recommend naming files without spaces (like between the words site and intro). I'll check back - I'd like to see this. p.s. I'm on a Mac and I'm using Netscape as my browser.

Hi If I was you, I'd redo the Mimic file at 12fps and redo your animation at 12fps. The lip sinc will still be ok for web delivery and the frame count will be way down from 30fps. Ed

I was able to check out your intro. The sound is very weak on my machine. Even turning the volume up to the max I can barely hear her talk. I would definitely redo the Mimic file and animation after seeing your intro. Ed (was 6.something of 12)

Well, I did what I could to up the volume of the sound, but it was a test-type recording from a friend I met on IRC, but I will ask her to make one thats louder and clearer. I tried to drop everything down to 12fps but its so slow that poser skips so many frames to make the sound match the animation that you cant tell if the character is saying anything. You get a few facial tic's and thats it. Thanks for the input all, I'll probably ask for more opinions in the future as this thing gets bigger.

You won't loose frames if you redo your mimic pz2 file at 12fps. You can't just retime the animation without loosing frames. It's much easier to redo your animation at 12fps instead of 30. Just MHO... Ed

LOL you make it sound soooo easy! Well, I will read up on how to retime this stuff, but I found that if I actually increase the speed of the animation, it turns out much cleaner and is almost timed perfectly to a frame with the sound file. Say the sound file is timed at 30fps, if I bump the animation to 39fps in flash, its almost looks like its supposed to! lol While the down side might be an increase in file size, it makes it look decent to the viewers until I'm able to figure out how to do this retiming thing then maybe I can knock it down to 12fps. Or will bringing it down to 12fps cause the file to be larger?

From a general animation standpoint, 39 fps is overkill. Just for reference, film is done at 24 fps. Video is done at 29.97 fps. The increase in fps poses two risks. One, obviously, is file size. The second is that it's more taxing on the viewers computer. The simplest way do figure out the retiming thing would be to use a real simple animation. Just bounce a ball or cube or something and make it your goal that it hits particular spots at particular times. You can create a test project real easily and figure things out this way. It'll be easier than having to render out a poser scene so you can see if the mouth is moving right. Once you've got the simple version down to where you understand what the contols/settings do, then you test it on moving mouths. You could even use the "head" figure that comes with Poser so you don't have to render everything else. Just an idea...

It really is that easy. The wav file isn't timed at any frame rate. Just load your wav file in Mimic, set the fps to 12 and hit the button to create the pose file. Open your pz3 file... clear the sound and then reapply the pz2. Do a test render and see what you end up with. Ed