#PAR
I have no personal experience with the PAR board, but I know about it a little
from
monthly Animation SIG meetings held here near Detroit.
I've been told that there is some loss due to the compression techniques
involved.
If you're only doing about 6 minutes of animation with very little compression
(I
don't know which ratio), the loss is minimal. If you try to take advantage of
the 12
minute length, you will notice the loss, however. For the board and the
hard-drive
required, you're talking about a close to $3000 investment.
Dale Myers, a local computer animator and whiz in general saves his files to
Exabyte tape and then takes the tape to a local production house (Grace & Wild)
where they convert it to digital then to 1 inch video tape (I think it's a $350
job).
An Exabyte drive capable of holding the targa files you'd create for a decent
short
animation costs around $3000, too. But there is no loss.
If you want basic conversion of your FLI & FLC files to VHS tape, and you can
live
with some color bleeding and loss of resolution, but absolutely no flicker and
a
generally acceptable video picture, check out the MultiPro CTV PC-to-video
converter box from AITech. It does a pretty good job and runs for about $244
mail order. BTW, it helps if you have your screen refresh rate at 60hz for no
flicker
at all and if you use Super-VHS.
Kevin