On a slightly related note of continious takes...

I had a quick look to see what the longest single take in the movies is and it seems to be a film called 'Timecode' which seems to have been shot 15 times each in a continious take http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0220100/trivia.

But also the film Serenitys opening shot is about 8 minutes continious from one steadycam and I think there is a strange Russian film that the name escapes me that was shot from one camera in one long hour and a hald take with no cuts at all (but it is supposed to be terrible)

G

The 3500 was a hypothetical number (although the largest none cut section would be about a minute so thats still a lot of frames).

As always it is a case of outputting the frames into folders for each scene then assemble in FCP (although playing around with the Lagarith codec seems to gives good results but is not compatible with macs as yet) .  I am pretty sure that trying to shoot a whole continious film in one cut using Poser would propably be tatamount to suicide.  A majority of the scenes are around 300-500 frames so its not quite as bad as I may have made out.

The main problem was that I needed to seemlessly cut the action from a couple of viewpoints, each around 30 seconds, I sorted it by rendering frames 01-750 from the main camera, then 751-1550 from  a second camera and putting it together in Final Cut.  While it was not really my preferred way to work around the problem it had the desired effect.

I agree that rendering huge animations in poser is a little mad, and one day I will finally get around to buying that plug-in that lets me render in max. (Although I must admit that Glow Worm does help a lot when it comes to rendering lots of files while I am out at work or asleep).

Anyway thanks for all your helps and maybe Poser will add a feature like this is a future release, I am sure it cannot be thaht hard and would be really useful.

G

Thanks for the Glow Worm tip, its not too expensive so I will have a look at it, to be honest it looks like a pretty decent bit of software anyway.

NukedBug is right on the definition f batch renderings, but there is also another aspect of batch rendering, and that is multipule renderings on a single machine, lets say you have 20 scenes in an animation set in a que, you set the render preferences and then a bit of python goes to work to render scene one, when its done it saves it, opens scene two, renders it and so on.  This is very useful as your machine can be working away while you sleep.

G

At the end of the day, Daz could have gone about this in a more customer frindly way... However they are running a business at the end of the day and in a matter of months V4 will be the new standard for poser female human models. In less than a year V3 will be living in the back reaches of the hard drive with all the other older models and we will all be singing the praises of V4 and worshipping at the shrine of Daz. (you may disagree but you know it is true) For what its worth curiosity actually got the better of me and I am gonna get me a V4... well it was gonna happen sooner or later I may as well ump on the bandwagon from the start. Gonzo

Natolii I actually did not know about the wardrobe wizard I've just had a look at it and it seems pretty essential to this 'upgrade' so thanks for that :) ... but I still think that if Daz had just a little loyalty to their previous customers they could have saved everyone a hell of a lot of converting and wiggling. Lets face it Daz is the Poser equivalent of Microsoft, it is possible get by without using their products, but sooner or later they're gonna get you and then you're their slave... forever (evil laugh). :p Gonzo

I for one am not going to rush out and buy V4, however the old argument of - is V4 better than V3 the honest answer is it really depends on who is using the programme. I have seen some amazing renders done with V2 and some god damn aweful ones done with V3 and visa versa. The Victoria series is like a brush, just having a slightly better brush does not make you a better artist. The one thing that I am pretty sure Daz will have done with V4 (I am sure you will shoot me down if I am wrong) but I am sure that Daz3D will have made V4 totally incompatable with V3 clothes, hair and so on (like they did on the V2-V3 swap). This means that if we go V4 in 6 months our massive V3 collections worth thousands of $ will be worthless (again) and we have to plough many more dollars into setting up our V4 collections. Why not keep the base model the same proportions to keep the model downwardly compatable... If I buy Poser 7 I am going to want to be able to open Poser 6 docs in it... same difference. The V4 model looks ok I guess, but I am not going to rush out and buy it just because she;s the new model on the block... Gonzo

I do agree that there are quite a few main advertising companies out there switching to PC's for various reasons. To be honest with all the PC users can now run Mac Os and Mac users running windows Vista sooner or later microsoft or apple will get their thinking hats on and develop a platform that runs on PC's and Macs natively. This will solve sooo many problems and finally end the PC vs Mac war which has been burning since the begining of time. To be honest I have not looked at Appature in any great extent. I don;t really have high hopes for it, but every once in a blue moon Apple actually get it right and bring out a strong ap that gives the competition a serious run. For example the programme to have for editing your movies and animations always used to be Adobe Premier, an ap I have always loved dispite its horredous record of stability. However when Final Cut V5 turned up about a year ago it out stripped prem in every way. Ok its not quite up to AVID stadards quite yet, but it really is not that far off. The main thing that holds FCP back is that it is not available on the PC yet for whatever inexplicable reason... You are quite right of course they had a crack at After Effects Market with Motion. Personally I liked after effects better, but the interface that switches between FCP, Motion, STP and Shake makes the work flow so much easier. So I now find myself using Motion more and am slowly warming to it. Anyway, since Adobe have now bought Macromedia, I assumming that Freehand MX2 and Photoshop CS3 will now intigrate like PS and Illustrator, the guys in the world of advertising and design will absolutly love this... So I guess the future of Photoshop is secure. (Even though they now join the ranks of Microsoft, Apple and 'Evil Incorporated' in the top ten 'Evil Organisations' chart... Mwwwhhhhaaaaaaa Doc Evil Pose Gonzo

The word on the street is that PS CS3 is out in Quarter 2 2007

Hmmm, that makes a bit more sense then - will CS3 (PC) be 64 bit?, if so the mac version will be differend as the Intel Macs do not generally support 64 bit... yet (excluding the new quad xenon mac) Adobe can solve this problem by bringing out a patch for CS2... I just don't get why not, CS3 is hardly an immenent release. Adobe tried to answer this is a recent press release can be found here. http://www.adobe.com/products/pdfs/intelmacsupport.pdf#search=%22photoshop%20CS2%20and%20Intel%20Macs%22 The short version of the long answer they give to 'why do customers have to wait for the next release' basically says that because it takes extensive testing and development they are going to ignore it and tweek their next release to the new standard... (paraphrasing) ... but how come Cinema 4D and many other programmes already have their patches out (and they seem to work fine) I noticed massive improvments in the performance of Cinema 4D 9.6 and Final Cut 5.1 (both universal upgrades) So either Adobe can't work out how to do it... or Adobe can't be bothered to upgrade CS2 so all the IntelMac users have to buy CS3 instead... its not just Photoshop, its all adobe applications. Flash, Dreamwaver, Freehand (yes Adobe own Macromedia now). I have always had a love for photoshop, and generally adobe, but I can feel my loyalty starting to wain... any company that can't be bothered about its customers gets to me.

Cheers Dudes/Dudettes, thanks for all the help :D

"Poser ate my Hard Drive" - sounds like a bad b-movie, I do agree though - it can be a pain, I just bought a larger hardrive and sulked :D Gonzo

Maybe it is just me, but the link just seems to open a new window with a page identical to the page with the link, is that right or is it supposed to be a new page???

Thanks All, I fixed it with the CR2Pro programme (it also sorted out all the .pz3 file old references too) Gonzo

I've linked the P5 library to the P4 runtime and all the mat poses, models and props are working great, when I load in a poser figure from my old work it tracks all the textures great. It is just when I come to making somthing new and assiging a texture or trans map from the old P4 texture library that things go the way of the pear.

I had a reply from Daz recently it took about a week for it to filter through the system, but it arrived so they are still there with people at the end of the emails. I do vaguely remember seeing somthing about an upgrade from mimic 1 to mimic 2, but I could not be sure if it was free or discounted, Daz are currently offering an upgrade from mimic 1 to mimic 2 'only until 30th June' for $45 which seems a little bit steep. Hope it all works out.