Feature length cartoons, animations, science fiction and other effects-heavy, budget-limited projects have allways needed special consideration. Essentially, the playing field has changed so radically that today's PC has more crunching power than ILM did back when they made Star Wars.

By using rather inexpensive software, on low-cost computers you've quite literally got the potential to create anything you can dream up. Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind when embarking on an effects-laden project is upward migration. Just because your project starts out on an iMac doesn't mean that it will end up on the same platform. This is such a simple, yet important concept that I am going to mount my trusty soap box for just a bit.

My wife and I have worked on numerous movies in the past dozen years where principal elements started as rough concept on a lap-top or desk top PC and ended up in multi-million dollar Inferno bays. The journey that an idea must travel, especially a unique visual concept, is a perilous one. Every time you re-cut a gem, you lose some of the original beauty.

One of the first projects we worked on together was the original pre-Visualization for Jurassic Park. It consisted of an animated movie that was created in MacroMedia's Director software and rendered out in the Beta version of Apple's QuickTime (then called RoadKill). Needless to say, the project, despite its diminutive beginnings, went on to much higher resolutions.

That same scenario is replayed daily in the world of digital production where cost-effective production technology initiates more ambitious projects. By creating a system where elements of original thought and inspiration can be easily utilized by larger and more powerful production environments you are future-proofing your intellectual property and increasing your movie's potential.

Now I'm about as big a fan of Pinnicle's Commotion and Adobe's AfterEffects as you'll find anywhere. I was beta tester for both software packages back when they were far, far less stable and can probably attribute a substantial amount of my income over the years to projects and effects sequences that Iıve created using them. One of the single best resources for getting up to speed in AfterEffects and Motion graphics in general is Creating Motion Graphics by Trish & Chris Meyer. If you've got a PC or a Mac, and are getting into digital moviemaking, you really need this book.

As you get into higher resolutions and larger budgets you might want to start doing work on dedicated workstations running Discreet Logic's Inferno. If so then you'll start running into the problem of upward migration.

Combustion, from Discreet Logic runs equally well on Mac or Windows machines, uses Adobe After Effects plug-ins and costs about the same (under $4,000) as comparable desktop applications. Essentially itıs the fully endowed, younger brother of the multi-million dollar Discreet Logic Inferno, which is the backbone of the high-end effects world. The cool thing is that everything you create in Combustion, like masks, chroma-keys, rotoscoping and such, ports directly upward into the big machines.

As much as I hate to learn new software applications, I am learning this one. My wife, who is an Inferno artist with movies like Godzilla, Armageddon, Mission Impossible II and Vertical Limit under her belt was an instant convert. Combustion is a 'must have' for anyone considering a future in high-end video or film production. Does it replace AfterEffects or Commotion? Jury's still out. I only wish they'd come out with it years ago when I was a lot more tractable.