I was wondering how to insert the 1 second black slate. Can anyone give me the steps to insert it? :]
When you are satisfied with your animation in 3dsm, render it to AVI at your chosen resolution. Then, use a video editing program such as Sony Vegas, or Adobe Premiere to add in your titles and black space. It seems you are new to this, so I recommend using Windows Movie Maker (or iMovie on mac) to do this. It is easy to use and will give you the results you are looking for.
I dont think you can use Windows Movie Maker since it only outputs to .wmv files. iMovie is great option if you have it, but if you dont - you can do all your post-editing with 3dsmax and free software only.
Look for tutorials on using Video Post - you can “glue” all your animation pieces in there, and add a black slate for specified duration. When you are done you can use virtualdub to reencode your animation and add a sound track.
video editing software… :ahh:
is there any way to add black in max alone? i was thinking that for a makeshift method it would be possible to just make a camera aimed away from everything so that the resulting view would be black, and have the view set to the camera for a few seconds.
is editing software absolutely needed to make an animation that fits all the requirements?
You can do that or just aim it at a plane with a black texture.
Yeah, 2 years ago when I did my teams animation, we rendered straight outta max. Just had all the scenes in one file, and set up a single camera to be at different points in the file based on scenes. For the screens, we just set up the camera in front of a screen that had a texture of the title.
thats what i was thinking of doing. i was worried that it might be harder than i expected, but if you pulled it off then i can always ask you if (when) i run into trouble 
Try using Video Post (I know there have been threads on CD before). I havent really used it (because i feel that a video editor is the better way to go), but I know that that is 3ds max’s built in post-render tool.