As seen on MAKE today:

Phil, you should check out this cool Apple II stop motion rig one of my commenters made in the 80’s, I think it’s right up your alley. He had the computer control the camera and a spinning wheel of color filters. The computer rendered one frame in monochrome for each color of each frame.

Years ago some of my friends were starting up a computer animation company, this was around 1990 or so. The computer they had was a 486DX that had MS DOS as it’s OS and was running a 3D program called Topaz. The computer had two special cards in it, one would act as the controller for a Sony Beta deck VTR and the other would display an image onto a NTSC video display. The animations were rendered to the video display one line at a time, sometimes taking hours for a single frame to render.  When the frame was finished the Beta deck would spring to life and make all sorts of mechanical sounds as the tape was brought to the record head and a single frame of video was recorded. This would repeat over and over again until the segment had been recorded. I’m very glad the good old days of computing are long gone.

Flickr - Cinimagic 1985