Digital Art Zone

I moved my animation to DS 4.5, so I can’t go back to 4 and now I’ve discovered that 4.5 won’t render an mov. It crashes every time with the message: “Error saving the file: [path and name of my file] The render could not be saved. Try again or choose a new file name.”  I’ve tried many times with different simple file names. One work around for me would be to render a series of pngs because I need an alpha channel. Although the pngs do render, but they are flattened onto the background. Is there some way to tell DS 4.5 to drop out the background?

PNG should give you an alpha channel - however, that will mask only areas with no geometry. You can’t separate “background” objects from the figures.

I’ve found PNG to be a PITA and even when it has an alpha channel it’s harder to work with, at least with Photoshop. If the render has an actual background image, the PNG loses it.

I use TIF instead. It retains the background image if there is one and has a perfect alpha channel.

The only way I have been able to reproduce this is when I do not have permission to write a file to the folder chosen.  Try choosing a different folder that you know you can save to.