

In your average piece of animation, how many of the frames are key frames
drawn by the animator, and how many are drawn by an inbetweener?

Even a small difference would have a huge impact; for example, having about a
third of the frames be keys is a little over half the work for the animators
compared to having half the frames be key frames, so this would obviously have
a huge impact on budget, as fewer keys means you don't need as many key
animators. I feel like a third or a fourth of frames being keys is probably
average, but I haven't been able to find anything to support or debunk this
hunch.

Anyone working in the anime industry, or familiar enough with it to give me a
ballpark?


CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-10-22T20:28:37.613
36987
2018-05-23T06:32:14.183
2018-03-24T05:15:58.580
2869
28865
question
anime-production
Ratio of key frames to in-between frames in anime


The answer is relatively simple when looking only at the ratio (ie. not at the
number of keyframes over the course of an episode or minute of anime).

Since keyframes are used at the start and the end of a smooth transition, each
movement, or transition, only has 2 keyframes, regardless of how many people
or objects are moving over a period of time.

From clicking around on [Wikipedia's Keyframe
page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_frame) we get that a movement can be
drawn in about 12 frames. With frame 1 and 12 being keyframes, the rest are
inbetweens, resulting in a 1:6 ratio of keyframes/inbetweens, where the ratio
can move to 1:12 if the movement/transition takes a full 24 frames, or may
even drop down to 1:3 (for example) if additional keyframes are introduced
successively in order to complete different motions starting and ending at
different times.


CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-27T00:05:01.033
41577
2017-07-27T00:05:01.033
34832
36987
answer