When I attempt to animate the arbor press in the animation tutorial, the animation it is extremely erratic and unrecognizable. This happens regardless of assembly simplicity or animation method. Has anyone ever had this problem? How can I fix this?
If you are using a fresh copy of the arbor press it should be relatively smooth. I just download them and ran through the animation tutorial and on our system it looks acceptable. The final animation will depend on the render animation settings. That leads to the question, is this the preview you are talking about or a final rendering? The first thing you will want to check is that your video card and driver are on the approved hardware list at this link.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/syscert?id=18844534&siteID=123112 Please make sure to switch to the hardware type to Graphics Hardware.
Another thing you may want to try is a fresh download of the tutorial files to eliminate it as a possibility.