I imagine this has been figured out by someone.  How do you render in Poser Pro 2010 without the background (alpha channel) ?  When I render an AVI movie I can't get the background out (always works well in DAZ though).  Thanks!

my vote would be to save as uncompressed tiff series or uncompressed mov file, which is like series of tiff files that's been concatenated (OS X).

To the best of my knowledge, Poser can't generate an AVI with alpha channel, although my experience isn't up-to-date on that score.

As Miss Nancy says, rendering to individual frame images followed by compositing is the preferred method. For one thing, if Poser crashes during the render (or you need to pause it for any other reason), you can easily restart from where you left off.

Hello,

If you're usings Windows , try a very good and very compatible VFW Lossless codec called "Ut Video Codec Suite"

(Click link and scroll down to the bottom for latest version  (v8.5.0) )

There are four encoding modes:

RGB  -  for regular Poser output

 RGBA  -  for Poser output plus Alpha,

YUV422  -  suitable for capturing live analogue video

YUV420  -  suitable for DV video and DVD video

Ut Video Codec appears to "get-along"  better in more applications than Lagarith Lossless does.

So,....  render out an image sequence, load them into your editor and save out an AVI  or save out you animation directly from Poser with Ut Video Codec RGBA and the alpha information should be preserved.

Take care

Thanks everyone - that was helpful / if I render a movie as an image file then Premiere CS5 will automatically put it into a video sequence (each picture as a single frame at 29.97 fps) with the alpha file so that is great.   I also tried the UT Video Codec and downloaded it but when I try to render in AVI I do not get the Codec as an option for compression (in fact I only get 'uncompressed video' as my option)   What I am doing wrong with using the CODEC?   Thanks

Hello,

I think with Adobe products like Premiere (I haven't used it in a while)   Uncompressed is default and you have to go into your "preferences" and change the  default to a codec,  or you need to create render profiles that you can choose from before output,  or just before you render, click on uncompressed, look at it's properties, then choose "Video For Windows" and then select the codec you want to use for your movie.

good luck

Very few AVI codecs support alpha channels, and even then it is a question of whether Poser Pro 2010 will actually use the Alpha channels in the compressor (for example Poser 7 and Poser pro support PSD but not the layers or the alpha channels).  Even if you render out to a sequential image format that supports alpha channels and compile in a movie editor such as premiere, most likely your AVI will not have an alpha channel (unless you have one of those ever so rare AVI codecs that supports it - then you just need to wory about compatibility with other software). The best bet is to do one of the following if you have trouble finding a codec and you absolutely need the output in a precompiled movie, to maximize cross compatibility among software:

1. Render out to MOV. Most quicktime codecs support alpha channels in them.

2. Render out your main AVI file - then render out a masked AVI file with just black and white. There are lots of tutorials and scripts on how to make alpha channels masks with Poser - just apply that concept to the whole movie.  Then you have a good mask to use either in Poser materials, or in your editing software or other applications.  I use Advanced Render Settings to generate mask passes myself, it's available at RDNA.

Best of luck to you.