How Do You Start Animation At A Specific Frame? For example things might happen in an animation for a few seconds like a flag starting to wave etc. etc. that you don't want anyone to see but you want recording to start 5 seconds into the animation but still have the effects of the wind (or whatever affects) as if that five seconds prior was rendered?

How do you do this? 

Thanks guys
Setting the Render Range

What you need to do is to start your render 5 seconds into your animation. You can accomplish this by setting the start frame to 5 seconds worth of frames into your animation. 

To determine how many frames are in 5 seconds of your animation, look at the Frame Rate setting in the Dimensions section of the Render tab:



Here we see that the animation's is set to have 25 frames per second (fps). So, to determine how many frames are in 5 seconds, simply multiply 25fps x 5 seconds = 125 frames. 

Then, just set your Start Frame to 125:



Another way to specify the Start and End Frames for your animation are in the Timeline window:



For a detailed description of how to set the Start Frame and End Frame for your animation, see the answer here.

You can also read more about render output settings in the Blender Manual.