You should try it out yourself. Create a basic skeleton with.. say... 10 frames and 3 joints. Go to frame 1 and set some rotations/translations. Go to the animate menu and DESELECT the "operate on selected joints only". Then set a keyframe.

Go to frame erm... 5 and set some more rotation and translation ON ONE JOINT (not the base joint, try the second one). the go to animate, reselect the "..on selected joints.." thinghy and set a keyframe.

Then go to frame 10, rotate/translate some more and again, deselect the "on selecten joints..." and set the last keyframe. Save, and look through the saved file. I can imagine 3 posibilities:

1) joint 1 & 3 have 2 keyframes, joint 2 has 3
2) joint 1 has 2 keyframes, joint 2&3 have 3 (because of dependancy)
3) all joints have 10 keyframes (milkshape save it all...)

EDIT: Just coocked up another possible solution: all 3 joints have 3 keyframes.

Sander Maréchal
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[edited by - sander on July 3, 2003 9:23:07 AM]

Actually each bone does NOT have to have the same number of frames, but for each frame a reference time is given. So Joint B may have frames at times 1,2,3,4,5 while it''s child Joint C could only have frames at times 1,4,5. When reading in the frames, you must take into account the times of each frame when rendering.