heyas all, need some assistance. The problem that I am having, is the render times. 5 hours for 14 frames, out of 638+ frames? owch. here's the spec's of my computer: Athlon XP 2400, 2 GHZ proc 1 gb RAM, ddr 2700 2700 rpm HDD Radeon 9600, 256mb 8x AGP video As far as the render settings, Its on Firefly Renderer, Production settings, raytracing on. The movie compression is set on Divx. Anyone know how I could speed up my render times, so that it'll only take a day to make a 21 second animation, instead of 8 days?

Its on Firefly Renderer, Production settings, raytracing on. The movie compression is set on Divx. That says it all, now doesn't it! ;) "Production", "raytracing", "Divx compression". These are all high-quality outputs for an image render, let alone an animation. And Poser is not well equipped to do animation at these levels (before flames touch butt)-> in reasonable time periods. You have to remember that high-quality animations, even using Professional software, is extremely processor and time consuming. This is the reason for 'render farms'. 20 seconds of animation can take days or weeks to create at these levels. Personally, I'd drop the DivX compression altogether. Drop saving as an animation altogether. Use single frame output renders and combine in other software (QuickTime, Premiere, etc.). This has two advantages: you can stop and start the render process at any time while guarding against crashes and you can check the progress while having more format options for creating the animation. If this is just a 'preview', I'd go way lower on settings for checking the results. No need to produce the final output just to check the results. If you need to check the quality, you can render small sections or just single frames.

ah, that makes sense. I don't usually have a problem with the production settings, so i was hoping it was the divx compression, and not the smoke coming from that box that is making all that noise underneath my monitor 8-) thanks kuro! PS: just need another monitor, hdd, and case, then i'll have my own render farm (3 desktops + laptop) :D too bad i haven't found a way to make poser batch render :(

Maybe in v6 or 7 they will at least make a way to send single frame animations to other computers, even if it's an external network render manager. But that is a long shot. I know the feeling. I have three desktops (one Mac) and a laptop, but don't even use them for animation rendering in Cinema 4D because the logistics can be complex - esp. going from Windows to Mac and a slow computer like my laptop can actually degrade render performance across the farm (plus, the other Windows box is a dedicated server which really excludes it from the farm). I find that a day or two to render a 30 second animation on a dual cpu is acceptable. :)

Renderfarm for "Final Fantasy, Spirit Within" was 1000 CPUs using Pixar's Renderman. I concur that rendering out to single frames is the way to go. Total control. Many are beginiing to conceptualize VuePro/Mover as the de facto solution for rendering Poser animations, even if you don't have to do any 'landscape' or other generation of content in Vue itself. Vue4Pro is on sale now pending next generation in a few months. ::::: Opera :::::