Check out the poser tutorials here, there's a couple on lighting. Nerd3D has one on volumetric lighting using Poser 5. you can fiddle around with ambient colors of objects to make them appear to glow, turn off their ability to cast shadows in order to make them appear as a light source. Spot lights can be XYZ positioned and aimed within Poser. I would try using multiple aimed spotlights outside and around the light source of your oil lamp, with the simulated light source object having a bright ambient color. "Global Illumination" in Poser isn't what you're used to. This effect is being simulated by placing a sphere of multiple, low-intensity infinite lights around the scene (sometimes as many as 20 or 30 lights). The "global illumination" light sets for sale at DAZ3D use this technique. The "ultimate fire" package in the market place is based on simulating a light source using aimed and positioned spot lights and works rather well. Every program has it's learning curve. Some just take more fiddling around time than others. :)

Attached Link: http://user.txcyber.com/~sgalls/

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=431398&Start=1&Artist=arfarfarf&ByArtist=Yes

who's a geek? That would probably be me. Look at ICARUS, a camera tracking program produced by the University of Manchester. It's free for personal use, about $1000 a seat for professional use. You'll have to google search for it - "icarus, univeristy of manchester" Take your video footage shot with an uncalibrated camera, feed it into ICARUS, let the program chew on it overnight, and it spits out exact x,y,z camera coordinates for every frame. ICARUS spits out data to LightWave, MAX, MAYA and .TXT files which are human readable. I've used it with MAX and it works great. ...and you don't have to pay for it 'till you start making money with it.

I use the Huffyuv codec on my PC for all of my post-production work. It's a lossless avi codec and is a much better alternative than doing everything without compression. After I'm happy with my edits, I convert to MPEG 1 or 2, or Flash depending on where I'm distributing... There's a lot of good info in Avery Lee's VirtualDub program's help file about video compression. I would read it, and here's some links- Huffyuv- http://www.math.berkeley.edu/~benrg/huffyuv.html VirtualDub links (codecs and what-not)- http://www186.pair.com/vdub/links

I agree about After Effects. I've been really happy with it after I woke up from being knocked out by the price. Also- I quit outputting final renders to avi movies. I output from Poser 4 or 3D Studio MAX to TIFF file sequences so I can keep the alpha channel information. Makes it so easy to composite in the end.

Y'know- I did a christmas animation with Poser 4 and was getting 12 sec/frame 720x480 on a P4/2Ghz 512Mb RAM. It was going to take forever. I blew the money, downloaded the Poser Pro Pack then rendered in 3D Studio MAX and got 2 to 4 sec/frame render times. - and got better output to boot. Batch rendering worked just fine with Windows XP home edition and I'm still using MAX 3.1... I just set it to batch render, went to bed and everything was ready for After Effects when I woke up :)

I have a whole studio of gadgets and boxes that make one noise or the other. I came across this little vocoder program awhile back but haven't had time to mess with it much. Maybe you want to give it a try- Check out "vocoder" on the download site. Feed it a sound wave (like a good fat analog synth patch) and a vocal track and it spits out a wave combination of the two. I got it free, I'm not sure if it is still offered at that great price. http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/audio.htm