A 2.66 Quad Mac Pro is the best buy (base, $2,500 with 1 GB RAM and 250 GB hard drive), beefed up with 4GB RAm, a graphics card upgrade (it really does help, especially if you're also doing video editing), and a larger hard drive should push you to about 4 grand. Non-Apple RAM is cheaper, but Apple is known for using "center cut filet" memory, so it may or may not be worth the extra. If money is an issue, I'd still stick with the 2.66 Mac Pro because it is easily upgradeable, while the iMacs (wonderful as they are -- I have a 24-incher, along with a Macbook Pro laptop and my Mac Pro workhorse) are more limited. I would also agree on their holding their value. I think my Mac G5 Dual is actually worth about what I paid for it about four years ago. Overall, the machines and the OS are just easier and more stable, and with Poser 7, it's a match made in heaven. But beware of Poser's latest service release!

Excuse me, I mean Vue 6 Infinite, not 6.1.

Well, well, well. I finally encountered the same problem on my Mac Pro rather than my laptop. The dialogue box claims it has something possibly to do with bucket sizes and adaptation vis a vis memory. But with 4 gigs, ya kinda wonder what's really up. I guess it could be the SR1. And thanks for the warning about Vue 6.1. I was about to buy it to do (among other things) some rendering. Now I'll wait a week or two.

Beryld, how did you get rid of SR1?

Thanks, jerr3d, but I'm not really looking for a workaround (for my higher-quality work, I usually do, in fact, output the project as stills and then assemble in Final Cut Pro; this is both a draft and a component of a larger animation). I'm more puzzled than anything about the shutdowns, and can't figure out why I'm having one when I've never had one before.

Re ccotwist3D's UK ad link, it's funny to see the ads done by another pair of actors. The identical dialogue is actually kind of disturbing. I think I like the American ads better in part because the PC guy is Gates-like and more obviously nerdy, and the Mac guy looks more like the US Gen Y prototype dude with a slacker-cool wardrobe. But maybe that's how the Brits see theirs. Now what I'd REALLY like to see is Fergie and the Queen do the ads. "Hi, I'm a queen" and "Hi, I'm a boor".

Thanks everyone, including 3Dave, jdcooke and Wolf359. And tvining, I've seen your animation work -- very, very polished, in all respects. Your use of high-resolution tiffs to compile video in FCP sure yields a professional product, and your "direction" and scene-planning obviously helps reduce your Poser workload, but I also wish I had your patience! I also found today a plug-in filter for Final Cut Pro made by Lyric (www.lyric.com) that easily creates a travel matte out of any distinguishable object in a video clip (e.g., a ball, a figure with certain chroma or luma characteristics, etc., etc.). That might be a help in post-Poser compositing, too. I'll find out. That said, I'll give each of your suggestions a try. God knows I'm not producing the quality of product that I'd like right now. Skeet

Along the same lines as VK and my earlier post on my company's switchover to Mac: Five years ago my kids' private elementary school switched from Mac to PC at the behest of a board member whose law firm was all PC and couldn't understand why anyone would own a Mac. They got what they thought was a great deal on all-new PCs and servers. But while the number of "seats" (desktop computers plus laptops) increased from 60 to 80, the annual per-unit and total system maintenance costs more than tripled over the next two years. It was an operating cost increase so huge (and unplanned) that it is now the second largest line item in the school's budget after teachers' salaries and benefits. It was, in the recent words of the headmaster, one of the worst financial blunders in the 80-year history of the school. As an aside, they are once again steadily increasing the number of Macs they have.

If you're getting a Mac mini, please also try to go with Poser 7 as well. And be generous with whatever RAM you can afford to add. P7's multi-processor capability and universal-code compliance make it night and day better performance-wise compared to P6 on the Mac mini. SS

I have noticed that in Poser 7 (if not previous versions) the rendering a movie slows down dramatically as it approaches that last 10-20 percent of the frames. So yeah, dying at the end might be a risk. And yes, while it is always safer to render and export one frame at a time, that in itself is (from my personal experience) brutally painstaking and requiring lots of attention. Poser 7 on a multi-processor machine with plenty of RAM has taken a lot of the fear out of using the "make movie" feature, even as it has also made rendering and exporting frame-by-frame faster as well. I still prefer to produce the different layers (foreground, middle distance and static props, background) of a Poser video composition as separate movies, and then combine them in a video edtor (Final Cut Pro in my case). The rendering is much faster and it allows me to tinker with the foreground layer (usually a figure or two) separately from the background layers. That said, I still have the problem of keying out the background, and if anyone has a way of doing that more successfully, I'd love to hear it. SS

We're not worthy! We're not worthy!

There is actually no sane reason that I should want to get rid of my Treo 700 for an iPhone. But I want one. I want one bad. And I don't understand why.

Yes, you can get a Mac Pro that is as fast or faster than any comparable PC. If you're buying in the US, the Mac and PC of the same configuration and performance are about the same. My setup (Mac Pro Core 2 Duo 2 x 2.66) was $2,500, plus an extra $800 for more RAM (total 4 GB) plus $400 for a video card upgrade.

I just upgraded my Mac Pro with an ATI Radeon X1900 XT. $400. Outstanding for 3D work, as well as for video editing, and a big improvement over the stock Mac Pro card. Don't know if there is a difference between how Poser 7 for Mac and Poser 7 for Windows when it comes to how well they work with the ATI versus Nvidia.

I would expect no less of PhilC than that he wishes to speak no ill of anyone. But I'm not as nice as Phil. I switched my company from PC to Mac after our servers were nearly wiped out by a series of virus and hacker attacks in 2001 and 2002. Although my staff still complains about cross-platform compatibility (Microsoft Office for Windows versus Microsoft Office for Mac) of large client spreadsheets and presentations with embedded objects, I've noted that nearly all of them have switched to Macs for their personal use. Perhaps it's still true that "once you go Mac, you never go back." I work with both Macs and PCs all the time, but with the PC's it's usually fixing problems (drivers, viruses, spyware, freezes and crashes, etc.) while with the Macs it's usually showing users how to take advantage of some labor-saving aspect of OS 10. The latter is a far more productive activity, to say the least. Mac users have a right to be at least a little smug because their computing is easier. Not perfect, or even more creative (rickymaveety), just easier. And perhaps cheaper, too: since my company no longer has the ridiculous system and per-seat maintenance costs that we had with Windows, we can put our money to work elsewhere. Our experience with Vista (we still have a few PCs) has only proven to us that Microsoft deserves whatever grief Apple wants to give them for taking so long and spending so much money to come up with a bloated imitation of an OS that's been out for several years. Vista is The New Coke, Budweiser Select and the Volkswagen Phaeton: a painfully clumsy, big-company attempt at a transformational product and image. Meanwhile, Mac OS 10.5 is on the way, along with (hopefully) more of those funny ads.