quality of animation question-program to use

was just wondering if you can make high quality aimations, like the dance animations at sine wave, with a free program..or is poser requied? quite a difference between free and $200! is the outcome just as different?

Avimator, Qavimator, Poser, etc all do basically the same thing with some miscellaneous productivity tweaks in the more expensive programs.

However, if you expect to make animations/dances like you see at Sine Wave, expect to spend a LOT of hours on just one small portion of the animation. I'm guessing that the Sine Wave people have a much higher end animation system than Poser, or maybe a motion capture system. In either case, the cost of something like that runs well into the thousands of dollars.

So, your choice to get that quality of animation is to spend many more times than Poser costs, or use Poser (or one of the free programs) and prepare to tweek and tweek and adjust and adjust for many many hours.

The three listed above are coolio: Avimator is my free choice right now. It works fine.

The Sine Wave animations are definitely mo-cap. Do not expect to make animations like that using any tool; mo-cap dance animations are based on recording the movements of skilled dancers in RL.