Animation Questions

I'll try to help out, but my familiarity in poser is very small.

If the animation in poser works the same way as animations in after effects, then what you will have are key frames.  If it's something as simple as move from point A to point B the keyframes would look something like this on the timeline:

Example:

@==========@

If you are adding more motions into the animation, so instead of going from point A to point B it's more going from point A, through B, all the way to C it would look something like this.

@=======&========@

If it's nothing like that and goes frame by frame, yikes I don't even want to start explaining that!

In order to get something to STOP, you usually have to put it into a new or different timeline, meaning that if you put all the animations in one single swoop.  The animation will just keep going through without any sense of stopping.

So if you wanted the animation to stop and have something like this…

@======@  if you continued to add more animations after that, it will look something like this@=====&====&=====&======@

But you can see the problem with that method.  If you wanted it to stop, it's just not going to happen because it's going to keep playing through.  Think of it like a local train or express train, with two keyframes you're taking the express.  But with multiple you're taking the local train and making stops along the way, but either way you're still going to make it to your destination.

If you want it to stop, you need to switch to another train and continue from there, does that make sense?

Now as for file formats:

Unless people have quicktime installed which surprisingly some people don't, the quicktime mov format might not be so easy to transfer.  The smallest filesize you can get is called MPEG 2 format, which is a significantly compressed version of the file, but the quality remains somewhat intact.  AVI will give you the highest quality you can get but will also give you an enormous file size.  I made one animation in after effects and the whole file, which was only maybe 15 seconds was 300 megabytes.  So you really need to play around with some compression tools to get it smaller.  Also keep in mind that the size of your screen will make a difference, if you export in 1600×900 or whatever the number is, that resolution will carry over into your movie and make the file size HUGE.

Standard TV format is 720 x 480 (NTSC in the US, PAL in other European countries)

You will want to shrink it down to that file size to avoid enormous file size problems.

Well that's all I can think of, hope that helps!

Mark the keyframes.  Also remember that you can set keyframes for specific joints.

I've just started playing around with Poser 6 myself, so I'm not really in any position to give advice on that front, but I'll give you a yell if I come across any decent tutorials. I can help out a bit with the file format stuff though.

As a Windows user, I have to say that I absolutely hate the Quicktime format! They force you to download itunes, a 50 MB download, just so you can play an animation file. It also keeps pestering me about upgrading to Quicktime Pro, grrrr. I also get the feeling that they did a really lazy port from Mac to PC, as Quicktime files have always played really choppily for me, even on today's incredibly powerful machines. I believe that Macs can play .AVI files out of the box, and I would say that .AVIs would be more friendly for Linux people and standalone multi-format DVD players too.

I'm not sure if this is what The_Collector_2 meant, but the best codec to use for videos you want to share on the net is MPEG-4. MPEG-2 is an older codec and is what DVDs and Digital TV use. It is normally used for much higher bit-rates than internet videos. Another thing I want to clear up is that both .MOV and .AVI formats are simply containers for the audio and video streams, and do not control how the audio and video are encoded. For .MOV files you may not have much control over what codec gets used (most likely a proprietary MPEG-4 implementation), but for .AVI files you normally have to select the video codec you want. I would say that Poser6 selects uncompressed frames by default, which is why you are getting such huge .AVI files. When I save an animation to a .AVI file with Poser6 under windows, it comes up with a dialog to select one of the codecs that are installed on my machine. I'm not sure what the Mac version does, though. If you decide to go with the .AVI format, I can highly recommend the Xvid MPEG-4 codec as it is open-source and therefore completely free. It has been ported to the Mac and is widely used on the net. Unfortunately the official Xvid codec is only released as a source package, however you could give this link a try http://www.xvidmovies.com/codec/.

Lastly, some good resolutions to use are 512×384 for 4:3 aspect ratio, and 624×352 for 16:9. These are smaller than the resolutions quoted by TC2, but are better suited to the bit-rates normally used for MPEG-4 videos.