The Tips in detail

 "Any good but cheap way to get animations to VCR?"

You could get a videocard with TV-out pretty cheap, but this is not going to give you that good quality depending on two things:

1. The quality of the TV-out, which never is near perfect.
2. You would need to be able to play the animation fullsized on your screen to be able to capture it, if you do not have frame-by-frame capturing on your video in some way. This means a fast videocard to play fullsize NTSC or PAL .AVI or so, do not know any that will...

So, another solution would of course be to get a dedicated video editing card, but that would also cost you alot more if you want quality.

BUT, there is a pretty cheap solution available now. If you do not already have one, get a MPEG decoder card, the ones used for DVD playback/decoding, usually costing around $100 I guess. Now get a software MPEG-2 encoder which will encode to VERY near DVD-quality MPEG-2 video which you will now be able to output via your MPEG-2 card in real-time, since that is what this card is for.

The thing with Riva TNT2 is that you can only port the signal to the TV and not the VCR. It doesn't say anything about it on the box, but reading the manual you will find out: When you port it to any VCR in any way, the image will fade in and out every 5 seconds, and not just the color...

You need a card with a TVout-port. There are many cheap cards having this. You must play the animation fullscreen, the resolution depends on if you want to do it for NTSC or PAL. If you do it for PAL or NTSC: you need a tool to make a postproduction to avoid false/strong colors in the final animation. Other way: render with check "PAL/NTSC-colors" option. Best tip: avoid strong red colors in any way!

The framerate for PAL must be 50 or 25fps; for NTSC or SECAM it is: 30 or 60fps (baserate is 60mhz there).

To play that baby fullscreen you need a good computer to stream the movie correctly to the screen. The quality is not the best (depends on the lowbudget TV-out on cheap cards) so it is not for "Episode 1"-like quality)

If your system is to slow to bring the animation fullscreen, use a codec (best: Sorensen (Quicktime)) to compress your movie for better streaming. By the way: with a programm like Adobe Premiere or Media Cleaner (best for converting media to different formats for web or whatever) you can set an option: "play every frame" ...very useful. But if you got high quality sounds (I mean big sounds ;)) in the animation you should better have a fast machine. ;)

compiled with hints from:
Roger Björn (rbjorn@algonet.se),
Anton Tokar (anttok@bergen.org) and
Unterreitmeier Sebastian (Sebastian.Unterreitmeier@mch20.sbs.de)