So what do you guys think?
I've been pondering this for a while. I usually render at 720 x 405 (16:9) for animation (for stills this is not an issue, I'll render as high as I can get away with, time is less of a concern) but I know this is well below the resolution used in the "industry". As I understand it the industry standard is "720p" (ie 1280×720 ~
wiki link) and this is the bottom end of the standard. To render at that resolution will take over three times longer at the same detail levels (maybe longer as at a higher res more detail will become apparent or conversely a lack of detail will show). I'm not overly convinced I can justify all those extra render hours.
My animations are mostly for personal pleasure, showing off to friends (hehe!) and (and here's the crunch) hopefully eventually chasing down some work. In the old days bandwidth was an issue, hence the need for small file sizes, but that's really not the case any more. So what is the expectation? Should I be aiming to create full size animations or can I stay with the smaller older formats?
I'm part way through bringing several of my older computers back to life in an attempt to make a small render farm. That will give me two P4's at about 3ghz each (a Rock laptop and a dell desktop), a quad core Q9450 @2.66Ghz and a core 2 duo 6600 @2.4ghz. I'm thinking the P4's are just going to be a waste of electricity but everything else may give a useful contribution.
I think I've answered my own questions here (lol) but I'd be interested to hear others points of view.
Cheers
Richard