[Keroko]

Trimming down the less-vital parts of the debate as well. Give me a holler if you think I skipped something important.

Originally Posted by Kaijo

Sure it wasn't selling more discs, because they needed more discs to contain 26 episodes? Regardless, it obviously wasn't selling well enough for a 4th season.

No, selling more per DVD. During the first week, the first StrikerS first DVD's had already outsold the A's DVD's that had already been on sale for two years.

Originally Posted by Kaijo

It still needs viewership when it airs, otherwise it doesn't air again. But not getting what you're saying by this. Gundam is also a seasonal one, and maintains a viewership and it's popularity.

Yes, and you note there can be quite a lengthy pause between the various series, yes?

Same principle. Because it's seasonal it can afford to take breaks from airing another anime. Series that slap a "too be continued" on each episode have a lot less opening in this regard.

Originally Posted by Kaijo

I was comparing the budget of A's to S1, not A's to the movies. As I said, if you have a budget for 6 hours of animation, yet spend it on 2 hours of animation instead, do you think you'll end up with higher or lower animation quality?

While your latter statement holds some truth, it is also folly to think there is no relation, either. If you double or triple the number of frames per second, you are going to generally get better quality. I was referring to the 6 hours of animation spent in 2 hours concept.

Sorry, the words "near movie quality" makes it rather hard to interpret as anything else to a comparison with the movies.

Now as for your question, depends. What are my deadlines? How much time in between episodes do I have? How big is the team I'm working with on either project? Are we outsourcing? How reliable is the company we're outsourcing to?

There's a large list of variables that differ between producing an anime series and a movie. This is just scratching the surface with what limited knowledge I have.

Take for example your last claim, "If you double or triple the number of frames per second, you are going to generally get better quality." Yes, this is true. But here's the catch: You have now also doubled or tripled your workload. Animation is not the same as shooting a movie. It is not as if a bigger, better camera will make the same scene recorded in the same amount of time better. Animation in more frames means you have to create more frames.

So say an anime is working with 12 frames of animation per second (this is very low quality, as you'll generally repeat the same frame twice to get the 24 fps, but it'll suit our "triple the fps" example), spread over six hours. That's 259.200 frames.

Now you're going to make a movie. Only two hours, but you will animate all 30 frames per second! This means you will have to animate... 216.000 frames.

Hmm. That's not nearly as much of a workload reduction, is it? Not to mention that in order to get a real quality increase (and this goes double for a movie) you will take far less animation shortcuts, which means that each frame requires more time than it would on a lower quality TV series.

Visual quality will definitely improve, but so does your workload, and thereby your costs.