I'm currently rendering a 180 frame animation at 250 x 250, using a clothed V3 with Kaz hair and some props. It seems to be stuck on frame 11 of the render. I do not have a very robust system at this time. I have a PIII 550 with 640MB of RAM, running Win2K. I know some people have remarked that they are unable to render animations using P5. I will be upgrading my system soon, so I am asking for some assistance from animators out there with some questions.

Have you successfully rendered an animation with P5?
If so, then what was the resolution and how complex was the scene?
What are your system specs?

I have Poser 4 Pro pack, so I am wondering if I should cut back a little on the system and put some money into Vue 4 and Mover 4 instead. Any opinions?

Thank you in advance for your input.

I don't have P5 but I have one option. You might consider rendering as a series of still images and then converting them to a movie in another app (a number of freebies or low cost movie making apps are available). This way, if it gets stuck at frame 11, you'd have frame 1 - 10 done. You could restart the render at frame 11. If it gets stuck again, you could restart the render again where it got stuck. I know it's not optimal but ... I use image sequences quite a bit and have broken things down like this for especially long renders. I can render them over several nights instead of tieng up the computer for 36 hours straight (or what ever).

Running Xp Pro, Pent4, 1500 ram. Even With this power, Poser 5 refuses to finish an animation render. Yes, I can get more frames than you, but I am still in the same boat, and from what info I have seen, so is everyone else. Poser 5 has been a total waste of money and time. And if it gets stuck at frame l0 or whatever, it doesn't just get stuck. No, it freezes! So there is no frame retrieval. Lesson learned, never again will I buy unproven software. So if you like still-lifes, it might prove to be sufficient, but animation? Forget it. Sorry I couldn,t help, and sorry for ranting.

I've had many many problems with P5 trying to render an animation... lockups, the computer reboots and the worst one... finally get one done only to find out that Poser corrupted the avi when it was writing it... I have actually uninstalled it for the time being. If I was going to try again I would definitely render a sequence of stills and put it together in a vid editing app. I've gone back to P4 with ProPack. I render most of the time in Cinema so this works better for me anyway... and definitely causes me less grief. Ed

I've had no problems with animations in Poser 5, although I still do big things with multiple figures on my more powerful Mac with P4-Propack (pending P5Mac). But then I ALWAYS render as a series of large images. That way I can render once, and go back and reuse anything as stills and in another format or other projects. Save as .tif files and you get an alpha channel, if you want to use it for bluescreen over other images or video. I also use this to do batch rendering of still images - by setting them up as frames of an animation and let them happily render away unattended. HTH, Elisa/gryffnn