Can someone tell me what the default AA settings are for Broadcast? You can't see them but I want to emulate broadcast but without motion blur and DOF.

You can switch to user settings in the render options and then load the file broadcast.urs as settings there. You find all the predefined render settings (extension .urs) in the folder "envirnment" in the Vue application folder. Then you simply switch off the settings you do not want and render. You of course can save the settings you have made for later use as well.

Okay i'm not finding where I LOAD the environment. I have the file on my pc but where do I open it? I'm looking through the user guide but so far am not seeing it....

I have VUE Esprit and do NOt have that option. Can you tell me what the anti-alias setting is for Broadcast?  Or if there is another way to get to this that would be great.  I'm not sure why this is not available to me in Esprit....

Thanks!  Min 4, Max 16 and Quality 60% - that is what I was wanting.  I've been dinking around for days with different settings and resulting render times. I was curious what VUE had for the broadcast preset......

One more question - in using these settings (min 4 max 16 quality 60%) and intending to author an animation to DVD what would be the vertical resolution to use? This will not be High Def but rather shown on a DVD player with hdmi in standard 480P upconverted to 720P.  

The reason I am asking is that if I use 720 - it looks okay but has artifacting and some fuzziness. It gets better when I go to 960 and even better at 1080 vertical resolution.   I don't know if I am overkilling this going above 720.  I just want it to be the best for what the eye can see and not take a millenium to render.   Any suggestion would be appreciated from your experiences on this....

Those AA setting will make terrible animations for DVDs.  Like most things Rendering is an Art and there is no one setting that makes a smooth flicker free animation.  One thing I know for sure is don't use the Automatic AA stategy.  Pick a setting proper for your animation.
 
Use compositing to speed up the render.  The background could be rendered with no AA.  Then in a video editor add blur to to it.  Render the foreground objects without the background and with high AA settings. Composite the two together.  I usually render out of vue  655 X 480, square pixels for DVDs.  I do a few small tests first to see what render settings are the best compromise between quality & speed.   

Good luck.

Rendering is an Art

Isn't that unfortunate? I certainly don't look at it as an art any more than logging into this forum is an art. Rendering needs to be made painless and a lot more predictable.

I don't think of it as unfortunate.  Often, when things get to the professional level, specialists are called in who dedicate their lives to specific fields.  Film would be a better analogy, than logging into a forum. Logging into a forum has nothing to do with what I am talking about.  

The render options in Vue make it better for us because we can choose many different controls based on our needs.  You just have to take the time.  It is a good thing.

Yes if I composite the space ship it will look better however I have the ship flying over a spectral cloud layer and diving down through it.  So compositing then becomes tricky and I wanted a more realistic "dive" into the clouds......

A dive into spectral clouds has to be one of the longest renders to do, but the effect is well worth it.  However, if ships are flying through clouds a lot or if the render time is too long, compositing maybe more practical.

One of the first animation we did with Vue 6 was a fly through from space to a flower on earth.  We did it in 3 segments.  The 1st was from space to the earth cloud.  The 2nd was from a Spectral cloud layer to the flower.  The 3rd was just a short fly through meta-clouds.  It was than edited all together.

Each segment had different render settings.

We did it this way because the render time was too great because of the spectral clouds.  We also had problems with random blue screens popping up suddenly in the clouds.  There were also a lot of other problems with shadows and flickers.

It may be wise to send your scene to a renderfarm and discuss the details with them.

Renderfarm? I'm just me and small potatoes......I've settled on a vertical 960 pixels which is twice the 480 that I will compress to in mpg.  The render for 10 seconds runs about 18 hours with 65% quality in the AA and min 4 max 16.   I just press render and then go away for a while.   The render at 1080 vertical takes a lot longer but doesn't look that much better when put on DVD.  Thanks for all of your comments.  I wil definitely render the space craft separately in Poser and composite to the scene in VUE when not needing a direct interact with the scene in VUE......