To get good results from animation, you can't rely on some clunky old bit-banger. On the PC side, you need at least a fast 486. On the Mac side, a Power PC is recommended. An Amiga should have a math coprocessor or the AGA chipset.

You�ll also need a lot of RAM. If the program requires 8 megabytes, you can be sure that 16 megabytes is closer to what you'll need. When you stint on RAM, the programs will slow to a crawl as they use the hard disk to make up for it. RAM is so expensive it'll make you cry, about $45 per megabyte. But you just need to bite the bullet and do it.

Of course, this is animation, so you need a good, fast graphics card. Go for 16- or 24-bit color and on a PC, look for a local-bus card for speed. A computer with a high-speed PCI bus will let you spend more time animating and less time waiting for data to drain from one peripheral to another.

If you intend to include digital video with your animation, your best bet is a fast and wide SCSI bus for your hard drives. If you can get 6 megabytes per second of throughput, you can capture broadcast-quality video. Four to five megabytes per second will suffice for VHS.

All that video has to live somewhere, and it's a terrible real-estate hog. You should be looking at gigabyte drives to start with. If you want to capture video, you'll need an AV drive that provides consistent speed without interruptions. Micropolis and Seagate make gigabyte AV drives, and unlike RAM, they don't cost an arm and a leg.

For even more capacity, you might look at disk arrays (called RAID for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Drives). By stacking up eight hard drives you can get eight times the throughput. A fast system like this is actually a full-fledged nonlinear editor, and it isn't cheap.

Can you still mix animation and video with a bare-bones system? Absolutely. With a genlock or overlay card, you can lay your animation on top of real-time video and record the mix straight back to tape. You never actually record the video stream onto a hard drive, so you can get by with a plain vanilla PC. An overlay card, like the Bravado card from Truevision, synchronizes the computer signal with the video frame.

Another way to output your animation is to use a single-frame animation controller like the DQ-Animaq. This NuBus card can control a single-framing VCR. Some VCRs, like the GVR-S950 from Sanyo, have a single-frame controller built in. For every frame in your animation, the VCR must do a preroll, then record a single frame. For a 30 second spot, that's almost a thousand preroll-record cycles.

A better method--one that won't thrash the life out of your expensive VCR--is to buy a hard disk-based animation recorder like the DR2100 Personal Animation Recorder (PAR, $1995) from Digital Processing Systems. This plug-in board, when hooked up to a hard drive, stores animations one frame at a time when they're done rendering. Then, it plays the animation back at 60 fields per second in real-time. All you need to do is hook up an ordinary VCR to the PAR's video output and press record.

Cels

The individual frames of an animation. The term is short for celluloid, the favored transparent material for drawing animation in the old studios.

Ease-in, ease-out

To make animation look more real and fluid, you need to accelerate and decelerate the motion. Disney animators are masters of the technique--every move starts slow, speeds up in the middle, and then slows down before halting. Most good animation programs support this feature.

Exposure sheet

This is a list of the frames in an animation and how many times each one plays or "exposes." It is a frame-by-frame script of the animation.

Frisket

This is mask that protects some part of the screen. You might make a frisket for a tree so that birds could fly behind it.

Inverse kinematics

A branch of dynamics that deals with the manipulation of mechanisms involving moving parts. This is the process which allows you to control the realistic movement of animated figures.

Jaggies

If you look closely, a simple line drawn on the computer looks like a tiny staircase. This is called aliasing, or more descriptively, the jaggies. To minimize this annoyance, software can pack some fainter pixels around the little steps to smooth the line out. This is called anti-aliasing or dejagging.

Matte, or alpha channel

Like a frisket, this is a mask that animators use to composite images. Called the alpha channel by computer folk, this is usually an 8-bit gray-scale map that defines the opacity of the overlaid image: transparent where it's black, opaque where it's white.

Onionskin

This is a method of registering frames of animation. It displays previous frames, usually dim and/or transparent, so that you can gauge the motion. The term comes from a type of translucent paper used in traditional pen-and-ink animation.

Rotoscoping

This is one of the best-kept secrets of animation. By tracing over video, you can create instant animation. Considered a cheat by some, rotoscoping is nevertheless a great way to learn about natural motion.

Spline

A method of defining vector graphics with a flexible line. A spline consists of two or more points; each point contains values affecting the angle of the lines entering and exiting it. Splines are the easiest way to define the motion of objects through your animation.

Tweening

Short for in-betweening, this thankless task is often performed by underpaid artists in large animation sweatshops. After the key-frame artist draws a few key pictures, it is up to the tweeners to supply all the slightly different in-between frames. Without tweening, animation looks jerky. Most animation programs provide positional tweening, where an image moves between two positions. For further control, most programs include a way to ease in and out of the motion.

Cels

The individual frames of an animation. The term is short for celluloid, the favored transparent material for drawing animation in the old studios.

Ease-in, ease-out

To make animation look more real and fluid, you need to accelerate and decelerate the motion. Disney animators are masters of the technique--every move starts slow, speeds up in the middle, and then slows down before halting. Most good animation programs support this feature.

Exposure sheet

This is a list of the frames in an animation and how many times each one plays or "exposes." It is a frame-by-frame script of the animation.

Frisket

This is mask that protects some part of the screen. You might make a frisket for a tree so that birds could fly behind it.

Inverse kinematics

A branch of dynamics that deals with the manipulation of mechanisms involving moving parts. This is the process which allows you to control the realistic movement of animated figures.

Jaggies

If you look closely, a simple line drawn on the computer looks like a tiny staircase. This is called aliasing, or more descriptively, the jaggies. To minimize this annoyance, software can pack some fainter pixels around the little steps to smooth the line out. This is called anti-aliasing or dejagging.

Matte, or alpha channel

Like a frisket, this is a mask that animators use to composite images. Called the alpha channel by computer folk, this is usually an 8-bit gray-scale map that defines the opacity of the overlaid image: transparent where it's black, opaque where it's white.

Onionskin

This is a method of registering frames of animation. It displays previous frames, usually dim and/or transparent, so that you can gauge the motion. The term comes from a type of translucent paper used in traditional pen-and-ink animation.

Rotoscoping

This is one of the best-kept secrets of animation. By tracing over video, you can create instant animation. Considered a cheat by some, rotoscoping is nevertheless a great way to learn about natural motion.

Spline

A method of defining vector graphics with a flexible line. A spline consists of two or more points; each point contains values affecting the angle of the lines entering and exiting it. Splines are the easiest way to define the motion of objects through your animation.

Tweening

Short for in-betweening, this thankless task is often performed by underpaid artists in large animation sweatshops. After the key-frame artist draws a few key pictures, it is up to the tweeners to supply all the slightly different in-between frames. Without tweening, animation looks jerky. Most animation programs provide positional tweening, where an image moves between two positions. For further control, most programs include a way to ease in and out of the motion.

This list is only a sampling. It is not meant to be comprehensive.

Autodesk, Inc.
2320 Marinship Way
Sausalito, CA 94965
(415) 507-5000

CrystalGraphics
3110 Patrick Henry Dr.
Santa Clara, CA 95054
(408) 496-6175

DiaQuest
1440 San Pablo Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94702
(510) 526-7167

Fractal Design Corp.
335 Spreckels Dr.
Aptos, CA 95003
(800) 297-2665

Hash, Inc.
2800 East Evergreen
Vancouver, WA 98661
(360) 750-0042

Macromedia, Inc.
600 Townsend St.
San Francisco, CA 94103-4945
(415) 252-2000

NewTek
1200 SW Executive Dr.
Topeka, KS 66615
(913) 228-8000

Strata, Inc.
2 West St. George Blvd. Ste. 21
St. George, UT 84770
(801) 628-5218