[tnpir4001]

The suite of software I'm using is:
Sets and Props: Bryce 7.1.99
Characters: Poser 7.4
Editing: Ulead Media Studio Pro 7.4

The short answer to your question is, yes. The character animations are rendered in Poser against black, which cues Poser to build in an alpha channel for the black background. My video editor, in turn, is smart enough to pick up that alpha channel, and use it to key in the backgrounds behind the characters. (When the camera moves, the process is a little more complicated and doesn't involve alpha channels, so we won't get into that.)

With the Bryce backgrounds, the workflow is more involved. Bryce doesn't know how to encode an alpha channel into its renders, so whenever I want to use alpha channeling there, I have to render out a separate animation explicitly for alpha-channel purposes. (Anytime you see a door opening, for instance, there are three elements: the "visible" portion, which is just the straight animation of the door opening, the alpha-channel animation that defines where I want the area past the door to be visible, and then the background plate itself.)

The trouble with Kristie's ponytail can't be solved by alpha-channeling. No matter how it's handled, the ponytail prop is still super high-poly, and it's still too much for Poser to handle. Recall that even at the "preview" settings I'm using to render all the other crew animations, animations involving both the high-poly Victoria 3 character, her clothing, and then the ponytail prop, still take a long time to render. At the settings necessary to make the ponytail properly visible, renders can literally take hours (a 258-frame animation--Garr's line about that "she was the symbol of everything he'd lost"--has been rendering for about five hours now, and it's still not done: 233 frames so far, 25 yet to go).