Hm, I think the trouble may be some funkiness in my object. I tried 180 MB and it still crashed. I modeled it in Amapi and exported it in Lightwave format, since Amapi doesn't do obj format. I tried the same operation using a simple ball prop and it didn't crash. And, once I put my figure together and took it to the Setup Room, "Create Perspective UVs" didn't crash Poser. (It didn't seem to have any visible effect -- does it just mark that group as being able to accept a texture, which can then be assigned separately in the Materials dialog?) Well, I'll use UV Mapper anyway, and chalk this up to a case of "Doc, it hurts when I do this!" -- "Well, don't do that!" By the way, as far as memory goes, I ran a utility that kept tabs on Poser's memory usage. It would seem that in the course of performing operations (posing, rendering, etc.) the memory required fluctuates by 1 MB or less. Apparently, giving Poser more memory lets you load more (or more complicated) figures.

Hmm, but I think the squeezing is just a visual effect -- the pixels are still square, not rectangular as used by DV. So if it's stretched out in conversion, you'll end up with less resolution. It's a hardware issue... computer pixels are square, video pixels are rectangular (0.888:1 pixel aspect ratio). I know for DV tape the frame resolution is 720 by 480. This is for non-letterboxed, 4:3 frame aspect ratio video; on a TV screen the 720 pixels are squeezed into the same width 640 pixels occupy on a computer screen of identical size. So you'd still need to render at 720 to avoid losing horizontal resolution. I would try setting the camera X scale to 88.88%, rendering at 720 by 480, saving as an uncompressed QuickTime movie, and using QuickTime Pro to convert the result to DV Stream format. (N.B. I know this would work on Mac, and presume QuickTime Pro for Windows can do the same conversion.) On a computer screen, the frame would look stretched, but once converted to video it would look normal. For real widescreen, find out what resolution is needed (in pixels) and render to that resolution. You'll have to figure out a compensation for the camera X scale, based on the aspect ratio of the pixel, not the frame. It may look stretched out on a computer monitor, but on DVD it should be correct.

I had no problem getting the free model with IE5 for Mac. I had subscribed to [bookmarked with automatic notification of changes, an IE5 feature] the "usual" download page -- it's still there (with the kids), but there's a separate page now for the dog so I had to get to it through the main page. Signed up with my e-mail address, clicked "remember me" (I thought I had before, oh well), and there it was.