Animo - ToonBoom Acquisition...

[donnie]

Have any of you guys ever seen this?:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1OFfs7geaw

Perhaps not a huge amount our beloved AS could not do but considering it was out in the early 90's its pretty impressive.

Now that toon Boom have apparently acquired Cambridge Animation,

(http://www.toonboom.com/pdf/pressReleas ... n20092.pdf)

will we have a serious challenger to As' vector manipulation features?

[jahnocli]

Competition makes you stronger...

[mkelley]

If I remember right (and I may not -- I'm old :>) Animo was a *very* high end animation program, even more expensive than TB Digital Pro (I seem to think that each module was around $5K and there were several modules). I do know that at the time it was so far priced out of what I was looking at it wasn't even a consideration (and that was when I was spending thousands on software for the business).

If so, it's unlikely they will remarket it in any way -- much more likely they will incorporate some of the features into the regular TB line somewhere. In any case, it has as much relevance to the AS market as high end steadicam cameras costing $20K have to people making home videos (IOW, none).

[jwlane]

I priced the Animo system back in the early 90's for a potential studio startup. My up and running cost was going to be about US$45,000. The network nodes were for something like (1) management; (1) final composite; (2) ink and paint; (1) scanning and formatting. I can't remember how much if any of that was for IBM desktops, which I believe were the preferred platforms.

To put things in perspective, a single seat of Softimage or Alias (precursor to Maya), only available for SGI computers, was over US$20,000. A Discreet Logic Flame suite could cost as much as US$500,000., and ran on an SGI unit the size of a refrigerator. Selling this stuff also made big margins for the reps. I don't miss it for a minute.

[InfoCentral]

I remember buying my first scanner. It was HP grayscale scanner and I paid $500, that was because the color one was going for $1,000.

[jahnocli]

"You had 1's and 0's? We had to use the letter 'O'." - Dilbert

[dueyftw]

My first scanner, you had to pull it across the paper. It had no motor, but was only 50 bucks.

Dale

[donnie]

I remember those scanners!...

[heyvern]

My first scanner, you had to pull it across the paper. It had no motor, but was only 50 bucks.

Dale

I still have one of those. And it works. But I have to fire up my old Mac IIci to use it.

-vern

[InfoCentral]

I tried one of those hand pulling scanners before buying the HP. I couldn't get it to scan properly so after several attempts I returned it and later got the flat bed.

There was a light on it that would be green if you were pulling at the correct speed and red if you were going too fast or too slow. At the time I need the scanner for OCR work and there was no way the little hand scanner was going to work. I figured that out real fast.