The default number of colors in Poser 5 for Flash Animation is "4". What is a good number to use to get a good render with nice color and in a decent amout of time. I typed in "250" but that was too high of a number and it was a very very slow render. Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

um, a good number is 4. Anything beyond 8 will pretty much stretch render time out into the days long point as the system has to completely recomupte the colors for each pass of each image each frame. Once did a 3 minute 256 color flash anim that took four weeks to render. Never rendered to flash format after that uless doing silhouettes (which is what it was originally intended for) or actually working entirely int he 8 color range (for cartoons). IT's not a realsitic tool for rendering animations to flash that look like "real" stuff -- for that it's much better to render to avi and then recomposite in Flash itself, and that will also produce a smaller file size.

it realy depends on the colours in the scene though ( and that 3 minute render must have been massiev in the amount of info on the stage cause I have never had an animation take that long in poser. What you nee to do is count the different colours in the scene ( generally I find tha 12 colours or 14 work well for a single figure. make it about 20 for 2 or more) also try to rnder the elements separatly, like if you have a couple of characters talking just standing there you only need to render out the back ground oncem then in the flash autoring environmt, give it it's own layer and have it cover all the scene.

I personally find the Flash export completely useless in Poser because it doesn't allow more than the basic colors, takes super-long to render and uses super-old Flash formats. They really need to update the Flash export system. It should be much better than it is now.

Wouldnt it be easier to export it as a .avi and import the avi into flash? then you can trace bitmaps etc or export each frame from flash into photoshop and use photoshop filters, might take a while but it wont take anywhere near 4 weeks.

Thanks for the many ideas.