'Those who would be critiqued by 'the masses', would best be served developing fusion-proof asses.' 'Meddle not in the affairs of 'Ahhtists'; For the arrogance is great....and maybe one in a thousand is actually as half as good as they'd like you to think they are.' A little wisdom from one of my editors-in-friend. Actually, to be fair, there are two kinds of art at work here; pure and practical. A purist can spend 6 months doing it all on one still. That is the whole purpose of the excercise. Practicals have real world conditions do contend with (Jobs, kids, $$$, lack of access to training, etc), and real world limitations (Job is only paying X amount, and is due in 4 days, that kind of thing). I'm a Practical, and make no bones about it. Poser's my animation solution, mainly because of the available content and the less steep learning curve. Aside from pleasure renders, the only other rendering I do in Poser is preview animations to check timing and so forth. I use Vue as my renderer for lots of reasons, including speed, network rendering, native Poser import, etc. I write on paper, then go to WordPerfect 8. Paper slows me down enough avoid the 'IgottaIdeaIgottaIdeaIgottaIdea' speed loop that leads to massive, painful rewriting and scrapping of vast swaths of text. I use Paintshop Pro because I'm not quite ready to try and grapple with Photoshop, and PSP does what I need done at the moment. I edit with Premiere Pro and do post in After Effects, with help from Particle Illusion. Scoring is either from the Magix Soundpool DVD's or Sonic Fire Pro 4, simply because sound adds so much to animation, and I can't afford an orchestra (or a couple of old farts on spoons and kazoo, if you want to get picky about it....). It's the old 'content vs vision' argument. My concerns are telling a good story. I could care less about bragging rights to intimate familiarlity to every polypoint coordinate. If there is a 'cheat' that helps me tell my story faster or better, then it isn't a cheat. It's a tool. Neither path is right or wrong, they are just different paths to the same place; touching another person with feelings, or making them stop and actually think for a moment.