I work in Bryce 4 on a Mac, and have played around a bit with animation. I've recently been doing some quick animations to use in videos I work on. Unfortunately, whenever I render my animations and import them into Final Cut Pro, the graphics always look jagged and low-quality. I've tried rendering them as DV MOVs, Animations, no-compression QuickTime MOVs, always at the highest quality setting. Does anyone have any insight into why the animations appear to have very low quality, and if I can do anything to change that?

Have you tried Rendering the Animation to Disk? I've had similar problems on large files and turns out I ddint have enough memory to Run Bryce and keep the animation from rendering.. This is a VERY rare thing to happen, but that may be a problem solution. (I havent heard of anyone else with my problem, so what the hell) I'm 98% sure this isnt the case, but it's worth a shot. Best regards, -Matt

make sure you have anti-aliasing turned on and when you render, do it at full frames uncompressed. full frames uncompressed is the highest possible quality animation you can do in Bryce, but it will be a VERY large file compared to mpeg, quicktime, etc... If that doesn't work, go to Corel.com and look up bryce for support. Maybe this'll help, Mythris

Render to an image sequence, then in a video editor, sequence the images into a movie. This has several advantages: (a) you can see the images before they get compressed by the video codec, to decide if it's the codec or the Bryce scene file that's the culprit (b) If you get interrupted while rendering a movie (power outage, out of memory, whatever), then you lose all the progress. Bryce doesn't save partial movie files. If you get interrupted while rendering to an image sequence, however, you only lose the current frame, and can re-render starting at that frame. (c) after the first few frames render, you can open them up and check for little details like lighting, etc. If you don't like it, you can abort the render then. With a movie you have to wait for the whole thing to render before you decide "gee, I think that bouncy ball would look better in green". --flick