You have no idea the capabilities of these programs do you? If you've used photoshop (which I'm sure very few of you have), it can do just about anything. I could turn 1 drawn image into a bunch of images and make a little movie out of it. And photoshop's a nothing program. I can't even imagine what their programs are capable of. I'll bet there are only around 2000 drawn images out of the 64,000 that are used. I'm not kidding. Technology is the largest factor in creating these tv eps.
You must understand, landbeforetimelover, that before they started using technology for the TV episodes and the movies (Pre-LBT 7), they all drew all the frames by hand. You are correct in that they would not be able dwell in a single frame for too long, since it would take years to complete a full movie, but artists don't draw the whole frame you see. You cannot treat a frame in the same way as a detailed picture, they simply don't compare to each other in the development.
In the TV series, you noticed that they had computer-generated scenes of the dinosaurs walking. You also probably noticed how ugly they looked. Sure, they could make the whole series like that and spend around half a week or less on an episode, but it would not look as good, and it would ruin the whole point of a cartoon. Cartoons looks better than that. I personally believe even the soft shading techniques used in the newer LBT 10 (though I didn't notice it as much in LBT 12) looks much worse than the classic LBTs (6 and below), because it has so much of a more animated cartoon feel to it, and they sure spent a lot of quality time on it.
Before they used technology, animations were done by first an animator drawing a background for these scenes. You probably would notice that a ton of backgrounds go into a movie, however you would also notice that most of them are re-used. The dynamic objects, such as boulders and characters are the tricker part. They are also drawn separate from the background, and are also drawn individually. However, they still reuse these "cels" quite a bit. If you noticed in the first Land Before Time movie, when Littlefoot's grandparents and Ducky's parents are eating leaves in the beginning of the movie, they are reused once again right before the ending credits. This saves a heck of a long time, since at that time they were producing movies every two years.
With the help of computers, the process would seem to be much faster, but they would still have to draw the pictures by hand in a sort of way before letting the computers colour it and place it in the animations. The point is that computers do not make the work any faster than it was, it just made it easier, and you cannot treat a picture that an artist would draw in a front cover to a frame in a movie. A picture would obviously take much more time since there is no basis from a previously drawn background and other character animations to be reused from. And to take the LBT TV series DVD cover to an example, they probably never actually took any of the images you see on the cover from a TV episode. They simply would not spend any less time than something the viewer would see on a DVD cover for minutes than glance at for a split second of a frame.
