CompuServe Messages

The problem I have heard of with rendering straight to tape is wear on the actual tape, not so much the heads. Your heads are staying on the same spot until time runs out and they go to the park-point. (3 mins default, I believe). This wears the tape out on that spot, apparently. I always render to disk first, then when the project's done I do the disk-to-vtr at a service bureau (don't have my own vtr). As far as disk drives go, I have about 700Mb on several drives and this has been enough for me, but I've never had more than 1200 frames on-line at a time. Go for as much as you can afford, but SCSI seems preferably since you can daisy-chain up to 7 drives on most controllers making adding drives easier.