About AniLot.com
AniLot.com is a small, independent site built around one thing: six free calculators for people planning or budgeting an animated production, plus a museum that traces the history of animation and the animals that have filled the screen since the earliest zoetropes. There is no studio behind it, no production credits, and no client list — just a set of tools we kept needing and decided to build properly. Here is a walk through each one.
Costing and budgeting a production
The Animation Cost Calculator takes a sequence’s length, frame rate, and per-frame production cost and turns them into total frame count, base cost, overhead, a grand total, and the cost per second — useful for sanity-checking a quote or sketching a rough number before one exists.
The Studio Budget Plannerworks at the level of a whole production instead of a single shot: enter team size, schedule length, weekly rate, software costs, and overhead, and it breaks out labor, software, subtotal, overhead, the total, and the cost per artist. It will not tell you what a studio should charge — only what your own numbers add up to.
Frames, ratios, and timing
The Frame Rate Calculatorconverts a length and frame rate into total frames, frames per minute, the duration of a single frame, and an SMPTE timecode — the kind of arithmetic that comes up constantly when planning shots or matching editorial to animation, and that is easy to get wrong by hand.
The Aspect Ratio Calculator reduces any width and height to a clean ratio such as 16:9, shows the decimal value, and scales a target width to the matching height, so a frame keeps its proportions when it moves between formats.
Rendering and delivery
The Render Time Estimatortakes a frame count and seconds-per-frame figure and estimates total render time, then splits that across a render farm to show the wall-clock time per machine — a quick way to see whether a deadline is realistic on the hardware you actually have.
The Video File Size Calculator estimates the size of a rendered clip from its length and its video and audio bitrates, showing video, audio, and total size in megabytes and gigabytes before you export or upload — handy for checking a file will fit a delivery limit or upload window ahead of time.
Museum
Away from the calculators, the Animation & the Animal Kingdom museum is a set of galleries covering the art of animation from the zoetrope to CGI, the wild animals and small creatures animation keeps returning to, and the pioneers who made drawings move. Every entry, image, and fact in the museum is drawn from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons; we did not write the history ourselves, we curated and organized public reference material. The blog and learn section hold shorter articles and explainers on the same subjects.
What this is and isn’t
AniLot.com is independent and supported by advertising — that is how a free site with no other revenue stays online. We are not affiliated with any animation studio, software vendor, or industry body, and none of the calculators above are professional production, financial, or legal advice. Every result is an estimate built from the numbers you enter; actual costs, render times, and file sizes depend on your own software, hardware, and studio rates, and should be confirmed with your vendors and collaborators before you commit a budget or a deadline. If something looks wrong or you think a tool is missing, the contact page reaches us directly.