Hi. I'm using Poser 5. I read in the manual that alpha channel backgrounds are possible, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to do it. I just tried rendering to AVI with the background over "background color", over "black" and over "Current Background Shader". None of these are providing an alpha channel background. Can someone tell me how to get an alpha channel background when creating an AVI? I know I can do it with an PNG export, but I'd like to do it with an AVI. Thanks.

In Mac OS, Quicktime is used to export the movie clip, which means that all the installed codecs are available as options when saving the movie. So I use "tiff" or "no compression" to get an alpha channel. It doesn't matter how you specify the background, which is left out of the alpha channel.

You'll need to use a video codec that has alpha-channel support.

Full frames (uncompressed RGB32) is one option.

Huffyuv is another; in the codec's configuration options, be certain you enable "Always suggest RGB" and "Enable RGBA".

CorePNG is a new lossless codec with alpha-channel support. It's still in a beta state, and has playback problems with Windows Media Player, but it seems to otherwise export properly from Poser. I haven't tested it in Premiere yet. I posted a review in the Director's Cut forum.

I don't think I understand. On the PC, my Make Movie options are AVI, Image and Flash. No MOV option. Also, at what point does TIFF format come into play? Is that something you select as part of the render settings?

Oh, okay, thanks Little Dragon - Let me experiment with that.

The QuickTime .mov option is only available on the Mac versions of Poser. When you export your animation as an image sequence, you're allowed to choose the image file format. TIFF, PNG, JPEG, BMP, etc. are all possibilities.

Thanks, the Full Frames Uncompressed worked just fine.