CompuServe Messages

I'd say you still want Animator Pro and Photoshop, but you might not really need Animator Studio, from your needs description. If you're going to be going to tape a lot, I'd suggest you look at the PAR (you may be able to pick up a used one soon, as the new PVR model is just coming out) and give up doing flics. The PAR is an adapter card that uses it's own separate hard disk as a digital VCR that can play-back in real time. There are some info documents in the libraries here. In addition to saving you the hassle of putting your flics to a tape/catridge medium to transport to a cervice bureau and then paying them to put it to tape, you also save the time during rendering of 3DS having to do palette-reduction for each frame plus flic-compile time. Then you hook up your own VCR to the PAR's outputs and tape away. In fact, if you get the Pyros' PAR Utilities, you can have each frame automatically copied/moved to the PAR drive as 3DS renders. The PAR/PVR is around $2k + hard drive, as I recall (it's been a awhile since I looked at my invoice <g>). Dave