I heard back from Poser 8 SmithMicro tech team. It's a developer issue and they are working on it with apologies. Apparently, the only way to get matte alpha channel in a movie is to render the animation as files (png or psd) with million + and then you'll get the alpha channel. Rendering as a quicktime movie currently is useless if you want an alpha channel.

YEP. THANKS!

Same thing happens with me. Does no one have an answer?

Yeah. I had rebooted Poser 6 and it is UVmapped. After all that I posted here for a solution.

Simple 3DS files shouldn't be a problem though, should it? If I export an OBJ, 3DMF, DXF or a 3DS file from Carrara and Poser supposedly has plug-ins to accept these files, why is it that it suddenly won't accept a 3DS file? It'll take all the others.

I have tried several others. This particular one is an .obj file that I exported from Poser into a 3DS file and tried to re-import it back in. It's actually been a while since I've been able to import a 3DS file into Poser, I just decided to import object files instead (though I had been able to import 3DS files before and I can't remember what Poser upgrade caused it to stop working because I don't import 3DS files that often), so I've ignored the problem until today ... sorry to say. It's just that the file size of a 3DS file is significantly lower and on this particular Poser document I'm working on kind of needs the benefit of a 3DS file size.

Okay, I just went to Curious Labs and found it. Thanks.

No, I have not. Where do I go to get that? Do you know of any other bugs in PPP that I am not aware of ... yet?

They are just magnets and I am using the Pro Pack.

Oh, they were rendered anti-aliased.

This is what I did: I asked what my clients budget was. I know that a 30 sec professional commercial animation can go for anywhere between $150,000 to $1,000,000 ... but who but a huge company can pay those rates? I say "be flexible." What I ended up charging was about $1200 for every 10 sec segment. This was for the Earth X short film for Marvel Comics/Alex Ross. Marvel didn't put up a penny. Alex paid out of his pocket. That's what he could afford. I don't believe there is an average rate. It's what you can get and what they can afford and if you want to do it or not depending upon the amount of time you put into it. Remember 720x486 is broadcast pixels when you render this out.

I have 100826k assigned to it at the moment. I have had as much as 120826k. You are right about it going ahead and rendering anyway ... but not for me lately. When it says it's done due to error, it's done. Before you laugh at me and my memory allocation, it has not been an issue in the past ... only in the last month or so. The suggested size is 64145k, but that will immediately get me not enough memory errors. 120826k seemed a goodly excessive amount, but it wasn't an issue on my 350mhz OS 8 G3. It's an issue on my 450mhz OS9 G4. I'm rendering out animations that range from 300 to 600 frames each and sometimes with a couple characters in it, FYI.

Do I just go back to the 4.02.117 version do you think?

But supposedly Poser doesn't have any extensions, so it shouldn't cause any conflicts anyway. Right?

Hmm ... I do have a ridiculous amount of memory allocated to it already.