okay more information. check this video out on youtube. When you see the broadcast quality render - look at the terrain and you'll see what I am talking about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMTNC1Ujeq0

Secondly, do the kickstart tutorial in VUE 6.  Have the camera move in on the coconut tree. Look at the terrain and look at the leaves.  there is all sort of artifacting/noise around these items as I mention above.  I thought Broadcast quality was a good setting for an animation.  Make your animation stop for a second or two and when the camera stops - the noise goes away pretty much.  So the issue is fly over by the camera when I see this.....

I have Esprit  6 and cannot find the texture AA check box. I don't know if Esprit has this.  I am going to try making the fractal simple as I have fiddled around a bit with the materials.  What about making it a displacement material instead - does that change the way the noise is generated??

I am usinig mpg-2 compression designed for authoring at 24p Widescreen for DVD Architect. Single frames in the time line are super sharp on the large screen but when I space through them even on the timeline in VEGAS I can see the change in noise pattern from frame to frame as I press the ==> key - so this means that each frame is rendered that way.  I will try putting to uncompressed AVI when I render from Vegas but I expect the same result given the previous sentence.
I will also try TIFF to see if any of this improves too - my guess is that it is the noise pattern generated by VUE that looks fine on a single frame but creates unintended "movement" when viewing in an animation.  Thanks for you response.

Yes I am using this to animate the bottom portion of a spaceship to give it some "life".  I wish I had a quad cpu super duper PC but I don't. 

What type of rendering times does this add? and did you use some fog so the light beams would be defined? it looks really good but am afraid if I have 8 of these the render times are going through the roof.....

Okay thanks this did work. Now how can you get the spotlight "source" to show on a render? What it lights and wher the light falls shows up but looking directly into the light renders nothing.  I know a point light will render but I want it to be shining in one direction.  Thoughts?

So you need to purge memory every time you hide a layer?  Does this affect the render if you don't?

I'm thinking that I would only want to import the Poser scene if I bring in the entire animation so that I can incorporate it into the VUE scene with lights, shadows, etc.  Otherwise in most situations I could composite the Poser figure into a VUE scene depending on where they'll go....I understand there is considerable overhead if when brining Poser into VUE although this is very handy.

good post!  I

s it more efficient to work with VOB vs OBJs?   I recently imported a flying saucer with MANY parts from an OBJ.  I then saved as a VUE object once I got everything like I wanted it.  I then re-imported the vob into the scene but really can't tell that it helped that much......I didn't realized that purging memory was so inportant all the time but I guess that option is there for a reason.......

When you choose the uncheck of render materials using poser shader tree - does that mean you lose all the material links or does that mean that the render will only be done inside VUE and not in Poser?  I find that having a poser pz3 scene in the VUE scene really slows things down....or it seems to...

Would it just be better to export from Poser the OBJ format of the posed figure and then just import that into VUE ?

Since I am creating an animation the other way to do this is to render the color and alpha.  Then in Sony Vegas for editing I can create the mask by parenting the alpha to the color track. These are extra steps I would prefer not to do. I see not transparancy option in Esprit but in Poser it produces the image on a transparent background for you which is really really handy.

Yeah its the transparency I'm looking for - I'll see if I can find this in Esprit....

I have Esprit and 8 layers. I see the visibility checkbox.  This will be used in an animation so creating a mask and color image is not desirable. In Poser it would give you the png with just what you rendered in the alpha channel so it overlays nicely w/o chromakeying or masking.

Thanks Stormchaser. My concern is that I am rendering images as follows:

16:9 aspect 960x540
User Settings like broadcast with motion blur unchecked
Optimized AA settings of 4, 6 and 50%
Sun Light lens flare off
Shadows at 80%
I have a scene with 2 poser files - one of them animated on a planet terrain with several terrains, about 8 rocks, 8 plants with a total of over 700 objects - the spaceship unfortunately has a zillion parts inside and out- it is static and does not move.
sun light, a point light, and a spot light.
Pentium III 3.0 ghz with 2 gigs of memory. ATI FireGL 3100 video card.

Each render takes 3 to 4 minutes to JPG file.  I have 265 frames in the fly by scene. I'm This means that this 11 second scene will take 13 hours at least to render. Is that normal?  

When I put the images together in Sony Vegas for editing and producting MPG files for DVDs I am using the 24p settings to create a progressive rather than interlaced video.  I am playing this on 62" DLP screen so all imperfections show. The larger the image I render the better it looks.  When I render at 854x480 the times are shorter but the image when compressed to MPG doesn't look that good on a large screen. When I up the pixels things improve. I'm trying to find what is the point at which it's at it's best - I don't think I need an Ultra setting do I?

Sorry for the long explanation but I am hoping that someone would look at all of this an determine if anything is out of whack or if I am not considering something....tks!!!

THanks.  I certainly don't want to render any more than needed given the final destination of the render. I will try that....

I just read the Render PDF. Very helpful. Now what changes if you're doing an animation and saving to AVI vs a sequence of individual images?  I get that using broadcast with blurring is going to cause longer renders. Why is blurrring turned on for broadcast setting?

Clearly when creating an anmation that will be shown most likely at most at SD 480P resolution there's bound to be the render setting with the biggest bang for the render buck! All others will likely be overkill and produce long renders that really don't amount to anything more for you on the monitor screen.  By the way I am producing the animation at 24 fps and then I will pull that into an editing program timeline.  The likely output will be 24p mpg files ready for DVD authoring.....

Thoughts or tweaks for this approach to renders?  Thanks so much.....

I uninstalled and reinstalled VUE  Esprit and did not update it to the latest version. When I did that the animations are now importing as expected. I'm not sure what went wrong. Tks for all of your assistance.