Has anyone else ever thought of using Fractint for fractal animations. I'm not on about just colour cycles (although they count) but I am mostly talking about animated zooms. I always thought that it would make a great animation to be able to "fly" into a fractal. Not just digtally zooming, but seeing the detail of the fractal unfold as though you were entering it. I have been experimenting with this a little by painstakingly incrementing zooms, rendering each image, and then placing them into an animation program. The major problem with this is that if along the way you make a mistake, or the motion isn't quite as you want it you need to go over the whole thing again.

Does anyone know if there is any pre-existing fractal animation programs out there, or tools for Fractint for doing this. I'm sure it would be a simple enough task for someone to program a "plugin" of sorts that would automate the task of animating. At it's most basic level it's simply a matter of having a start image, zooming in to the required spot on the start image that you wish to be the end image and then it calculates and renders each frame, as it renders it saves each frame as either a seperate image, or as part of a multi-image file as a complete animation. I, personally, don't mind it generating loads of seperate images as putting them together as an animation is not the hardest part of the job. On a slightly more advanced level you could add keyframes to make the animation stop zooming and start panning, start rotating at a specific point, etc.