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special effect post-production is also going the same way as software. Animators are having to put in similar hours, on a contract basis, for relatively short PP times. Apparently, PP is now becoming "Burn Out City" for PP and FX artists.

I can definitely vouch for this. It's been this way in the movie biz for ever and is the main reason I never jumped ship from games to work in film. It's ALWAYS crunch on a movie. I've had many friends at ILM, Tippet, Sony, and PDI that got burnt out after a year.

Ditto. Digital Domain starts you out with 10 hour days, whether you're busy, or not. When you need to start the OT, it goes to 12, then 14. I'm fortunate to be at one of the few companies around that recognizes the value of not killing your staff. Of course, it was started by a few people that noticed that the seasoned employees had a tendency to leave the industry when it came time to start a family, and didn't want to keep losing that talent pool. Our workweek is 40 hours, unless we have supervisor approval -- working OT without it is actually in the employee handbook as cause for dismissal. I've been spoken to a few times about working OT without that approval. That said, we do have our two month long crunch time, but when we do, we get paid the OT for it. That's part of the reason they try not to have us work OT -- it's expensive for the company (we bid a particular amount for the project, so any OT comes out of *our* pocket, unless the OT is because the client asked for something new that wasn't in the original bid), and it throws our bidding off, because we have a more difficult time figuring out how long things will take, and the staffing levels required. To help even out those crunches, we also get good vacation time. Some of the animators and other artists at work had four and five month long vacations this summer. Everyone starts with three weeks, and artists get an additional 6, which the company uses to tell people to go on vacation when there's no work.