QuickTime questions

[nathan@akbar.teleos.com]

I would like to create a small animation pencil test system on the Mac
in MCL.  A "pencil test" is an early stage in the development of a
piece of animation.  All of the drawings are line drawings with no
color, usually drawn with a pencil (hence the name).  The pencil test
is critical for getting the character motion right.  The kind of
things you want to be able to do is adjust the number of times a given
frame appears, insert a new frame, remove old frames, rearrange the
order, repeat a section, etc.  In many ways it seems that QuickTime
would be ideal for this kind of application, hence my questions.

1) What are the practical limits of QuickTime?  Ideally I'd like to
know that I can reliably animate "N XxY {one-bit, gray, color} images
that compress to P% at M frames per second on a Mac Z."  By "reliably"
I mean show every image for the specified amount of time without
skipping any frames.  Any bindings for any useful subset of N, X, Y,
image type, P, M and Z would be helpful.

2) How easy is it to go from a set of images created by a scanner, to
a QuickTime movie?

3) What systems are available for the Mac that can generate NTSC output,
and how easy would it be to interface them to QuickTime?  I'd love to
hear from anyone with any practical experience with any such system.

Thanks in advance,

Nathan Wilson
Teleos Research
nathan@teleos.com