First, I am new to Poser and have version 5. Every time I attempt to render an animation I get different results than the smooth animation in the preview. It does not render smoothly between key frames. The final product looks like it jumps between about every third frame. How do I get smooth transitions between key frames? I have tried everything from 30 fps to 60 fps with the same results.

It sounds like you're trying to render directly to MPG or some other codec. This isn't a good idea, even though Poser will let you do it. Rendering to "Full frames uncompressed" should give clean results. You can then convert the result to MPG or whatever externally. Most flexible is to use "Image sequence", but this requires you to put the images back together in some external video processor.

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Try linear interpolation or spline break, to smooth out the wacky spline glitches.

Thanks, I am rendering "Full frames uncompressed" and using linear interpolation but still getting bad results. I am going to take your advice to "use image sequence" and do the animation in Adobe CS. Thanks for your replies:)

Motion blur can be used to smooth out strobe effects that you can get with fast motion - don't know if that is what you're seeing.

Two things. You can get good looking Renders in any format if you choose the option of Current Render Settings. With that said, the choppiness may be the result of your Key Frames and changes you made along with the total number of frames. Try adding a few extra frames into the image or move the Key frame later. Also, you should be able to run the Animation without rendering using the Animation Control Bar at the bottom.

ratscloset
aka John

Here's my guess: When you run the preview,and it looks good, you're running it with the "Skip Frames" option turned off, and it runs about the speed you want. Then when you render it, it goes all wacky, like it's running too fast... If this is the case, you should try re-timing the animation. Linear interpolation should really only be used for robots and machines.

Need clarification re when you are seeing the jumpy playback. For example, if you're talking about having rendered an animation as an uncompressed AVI file then you try to play it in Windows Media Player, Quicktime, or some other player but it is jerky and skips alot, that's because your computer just can't handle the data stream in real time. I have a Dell Precision M50 workstation, and even that is not fast enough to run an uncompressed format AVI file in real time, even at 640x480. What I do is render as an image sequence (in Cinema 4D) then use Quicktime to assemble the animation, then I save it as a freestanding Quicktime MOV file (i.e., without the file dependencies). Then the MOV file usually runs in real time. For final animations, I import the MOV file into Ulead Movie Factory 2 and burn it to DVD. Result: great graphics quality at full speed on a DVD player.

But I'm just speculating that this is the animation playback problem you're facing. So was that it, or is it something else?