POV-Ray Tips: Rendering & Output

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POV-Ray Tips, Tricks, and Techniques	Making Demo Tapes?


Kareem Badr asks about making demo tapes, but someone responds incorrectly:		<snip>
Florian responds:		...the question was definitely not how to produce a cover for a audio tape case, but how to render video quality animations. 320x200 looks like an lower limit to me (PAL TV has 625 (or so) lines), but with appropriate antialiasing you might get away with it.
Kareem Badr replies and restates his question:		Thank you! YOU realize what I was asking. So, instead of rendering at 320x240 (I mistakingly put 320x200 before) at 30fps, what would you recommend? If I had to, I could gain access to my university's mainframe for an hour or two to render scenes at a higher resloution. Also, if I render at 30fps and then transfer it to video, will it look right, or should I re-render them at 25fps (that's video frame-rate, right)? What is the best resolution to render at, taking into account that if I do it on M system it will take DAYS, maybe even WEEKS to do and if I use my university's Mainframe, they charge $10-20 an hour. If a company knew that I was producing my animtions on a home PC, would they take that into account or would they just see a bad resolution and say, "This is garbage--next."? Thank you, in advance.
Finally, Carl Perkins gets definitive:		PAL and SECAM frame rates are 25 frames/sec (really 50 fields (half frames) per second interlaced), NTSC field rate is 30 frames/sec (really 60 fields/sec). Since you are posting from the Univeristy of Texas, I assume you will be recording on the format used in the US, which is NTSC. The CCIR-601 (a standard which defines this sort of thing) resolution for NTSC is 704 by 486 by 30hz (well technically is is 720 by 243 by 60 fields/sec in an interlaced format). You probably don't have to worry about this - you should use the resolution of the format you will be taping to instead, and that will be lower unless you record on a professional, studio type, system. VHS tapes have a resolution of (in the NTSC format) 352 by 240 (more or less - different types of info are sampled at different rates, technically 352 by 480 would be slightly better since that is the rate at which the luminance signal is sampled vertically). Super-VHS has a higher resolution, and the pro D-1 and D-2 are higher yet (up to the full CCIR-601 resolution). If you want PAL format, you may want a bit higher resolution per frame at the 25 frame/sec rate. In short (too late), 352 by 240 by 30hz is good enough for VHS purposes, although depending on how the system you are using to put it on tape works, and if you want to use some of the frames as stills, you may want to use a correct 4:3 aspect ratio of 360 by 240. This will give you about as good of a quality as you can get on VHS. More than you really wanted to know...