I did use Premiere, but I just stuck in some black video at the ends, trimmed and faded it a little bit, and layered in the audio. I did put in some key frames for the audio volume, but that was it. I have Sound Forge, and that will let me import a video to match audio up with. Mostly I use it for compositing single sound effects, not for layering tracks. The only thing I don't like about it is that it's a destructive editor, and it's hard to work with several tracks at once. I lke the NLE sound editor in Premiere, but I'm not as used to it.

Is there a motion blur filter in Premiere? I'll have to look into that, I didn't know that was an option. I know AE has a motion blur feature, but I think it may be just for text and shape layers. I could be mistaken, though... so much to learn.

I've got Pro Tools on my wish list, but A) it's down below several other things, and B) I'm trying not buy new tools this year. I am allowing myself a budget of up to $100 per animation, but that won't buy software. On this one, I did buy a nice royalty free audio library of about 100 animal sounds (natch) so I've got a library of good sound effects started. For the next one, I'm going to model the main two characters and most of the background myself, but I am going to buy a couple of rigged models from DAZ to fill in around the edges.

I've found that, all else being equal, Carrara is usually faster at rendering than Poser. For this one, I cranked up the anti-aliasing, probably way too high. I had some trouble with the hair primitive (the fringe on the hat is a hair object) and shadow maps, so I used ray-traced soft shadows, which is another time-eater. I ended up with only two lights, an overhead light the color of sunlight set to a very high intensity (which adds to the render time, but I'm not sure why) and a shadowless keylight in a green shade from underneath, to give a "foliage" feel to the shot. I turned up the ambience to get away with out a side fill or back light, so that saved some time. I think the intense light and the anti-aliasing hurt me because there are so many parts of the model that have tiny white lines painted on as a transmap (the chin and side fur). There was so much contrast between the solid white lines and the alpha background that it took longer. I should have planned my background color to be black in the first place and rendered on black, which I think would have been quicker, and I think I could have used a lower tolerance on the anti-aliasing, and it would have been just as good.

I have Cinema 4D, which has a faster renderer yet, but I don't know it well enough yet to do a while project in it yet. I've got a Core2 Duo running at 3.16 GHz, which isn't bad, but I am eyeing an i7 chip for my next computer. Carrara in it's current incarnation is only 32 bit, but C4D is 64 bit, and the next Carrara is supposed to be 64 also, all of which will help.

I did an animation (here) right after I got Carrara that isn't very good, but I did put all of the audio together first, and keyframed all of my actions based on the length of the audio. I had one bit where a character comes by on a skateboard, and I had SFX of a skateboard going by on concrete. I worked out the timing of the shot based on that plus an estimate of how fast a skateboarder would be traveling, and used that information to get the character an accurate distance from the camera. I "lip synced" the vocal audio to a robot by keyframing a color change in the face plate to the spikes in the audio waveform. The mic I had was pretty bad, I ended up getting a good one after I made that animation. The new one I'm working on now doesn't have dialogue, just short SFX, so lip sync isn't going to be a problem. I've got Mimic for Carrara, but I haven't used it before, so I don't want to jump in and try to learn it until I've got one or two more animations under my belt.

On the tiger animation, I did several renders using the Draft render in Carrara, which gave me the big movements. It doesn't do textures, though, so I couldn't see the eyes or the fur. Later I did several renders (about 20 in all) at 640 x 480 but without any smoothing or shadows to fine tune the movements. I did the final render at 720 pixels high, then I composited the render in After Effects to 1280 x 720, and added the text reveal.

I've been a software developer for many years, so I'm pretty good about saving my work as I go. I use a sequential file naming scheme to keep things together. For models I create in Wing, for example, I use a name for the model, a letter to indicate the "version", and a three digit sequence number. So, I have a file named "TriCorn Hat A 001.wings", like that. Even if I'm satisfied with a later version, I always keep the old ones, just in case. When I'm actively working on a project, I keep the project files on a flash drive I carry with me (sometimes, on breaks or at lunch, I'll make models at work) and then I copy the flash drive to an external hard drive at home. When the project's done, I move all the files to an external drive, compress them, and move them to an "Archive" folder. I'm hoping to be able to go back and look at the work I've done before, and try to improve my consistency.

I kept a log on the tiger animation, too, to track where I was at with modeling, texturing, lighting, animating, all that stuff. If I put something on the list but decided not to do it, I made a note as to when and why. For example, I was originally going to use an HDRI for the lighting, but it would have taken about 400 hours to do the rendering on my machine, so I scrapped it.

I need a hilly landscape with a road and a creek for the next one, done in a "toon" style, so that's what I'm working on now. C4D has a nice Bezier patch primitive that looks well suited to the task, and it will convert the result to a polygon mesh, so I can use it in Carrara. I think that'll be the fastest way to go for me, and it'll keep me moving, which is the most important part.