> - did you ever used the os shp builder 3 beta in your life? You really dont need Image Robot with that... I'm serious!

I used it once or twice. Converion speed was good, but I really like the fact the the Mixer can turn 100 pcx's into an shp in a blink or less. But you probably mean color replace? I don't think I've used your batch convert ever, I'll check it out then.

The main reason I'm using Image robot is because when I convert my 32 bit rendered images to an 8 bit format, each file has a different pallete, and the Mixer only reads the first and converts the rest with respect to that, so animations will always have severly messed up colors unless I use JIR or something to convert them all to the pallete I'm using. I also use it to change the shadow color on my rendered frames (can't output the exact color used by shadows).

This is one reason I do like OS SHP- it can read 32 bit bmps so i don't need to worry about my input files' palletes.

I use the Mixer anyway because the whole process takes time if you consider the need for resizing to introduce the smoothing I'd otherwise get with AA.

The only other reason why I don't prefer OS SHP is the compression it uses. I'm very picky about this stuff, and whenever I used OS SHP I always ended up taking the (near) final shp, then using Mixer to convert to pcx and back to shp so I could get decent compression.

Here is my well refiend process:

Render at 3 times normal size and AA off
Batch convert with JIR to fix shadows and make 8 bit pcx all with the pallete I need.
Convert to shp with Mixer.
Resize with Mixer to 1/3.
Copy shp as pcx.
Run JIR again, this time to fix the shadow problem cause by Mixer resize.
Convert back to shp with Mixer.

meselfs himself!