pasithea

Probably no one cares, but I thought I'd list out my steps for getting near professional quality animation on a shoestring budget.

Buy box of printer paper.

Hole-punch printer paper. (I use my school's animation punch, but a 3-hole punch will do if you're making your own registry

Pencil animation

Pencil-test animation... You can use a webcam and Premiere or Flash or freeware like Anasazi or Virtual Dub or Gif Construction Set. You could also use a scanner here but it'd be slow and tedious. A cheapo camera is a better solution.

Revise pencils and repeat previous step as needed.

Ink drawings. (You could do this on the paper if you draw light, or you could put another page over it and trace, like I do)

Photograph inked drawings and convert them to 2-colour mode. (Posterize in Premiere or Photoshop) and save them as some exact format. GIF, TIF, TGA.

Import files into flash and use 'Trace Bitmap' to convert them to vectors (you'll need to fiddle with settings a bit here to get the look you want)

From here, you can colour your drawings and save them as symbols. Since they're now vectors, you can scale them as much as you want without mangling them, flip them left to right, put them on any layer without colour issues, etc. You're basically doing what you could do with a program like Toonz but for the cost of Flash. When you get everything set up how you want it, you can do a save-to-quicktime(or AVI)at some large resolution, do all your titling and transitions in a program that is less frustrating than Flash, and export it to tape or DVD at full resolution.
It seems to be the best of all worlds. You get the personality of pencil art, the vectory computer ability to fiddle with things to perfection, and you can (theoretically) make theatre-quality presentations using a 640x480 webcam. This approach should work on any computer built within the last decade too. No need for blindingly fast top of the line, 300 dual-2Ghz processor render-farms. A pencil, a webcam, and a second-hand computer will do.

Of course, there's lotsa things one could do to make this process better. Trace the pencils with a tablet, for instance, and skip the conversion steps. My point was just that for < $1000 anyone could be doing at the very least broadcast-quality animation. So... What are you waiting for? :)