video animation help

I'm trying to take some basic animation footage (first edited in Final Cut) into 3ds max 2009. They are basic geometric shapes that need to fade into the black background. So basically, say you have a white triangle on a black background and you want it to fade into black over a 1-minute time span, what should I use to best achieve this? Any advice on these tools in max would be very very helpful!

Take a look at this thread: http://www.cadtutor.net/forum/showthread.php?t=41575 down toward the bottom of the page.

thanks! I'll give this a try

Are you talking about - how to take one layer of an animation and fade it into another? If so you could download Wax 2.0 from here: http://www.debugmode.com/wax/

It's pretty easy to find your way round. You can animate Opacity on each track. Background is already black. Add a Quick 3D modifier to your track if you need to move it around etc.

Render your animation uncompressed and use Super to compress it, WMV & H264 are the best I've tried so far:

http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html