My project: I am going to make a full length animated film on my PC using Bryce4 and more. Hour and a half to two or so. I want it full sized, full screen so that I can burn it to DVD in the not too distant future when DVD-RW become more affordable. I should be nearly finished by then. Yeah, I know the memory req will be GIGAHUGE, but I have close to 50 gigs HD and planning on writing to a bunchload of CD-RWs. For now, I'll be storing the files as individual frames in jpeg format, which is where you start with DVD. I'll also be switching to a Pentium 4, because right now I have an AMD Athlon Thunderbird 700Mhz. And I am not impressed with it. Seemed like my old 266Mhz Pentium Celeron II worked just as fast. I even threw in 256Megs SDRAM. Fast as cetchup. My question: I know motion pictures are usually in 16mm to 35mm, but should I be using Cinemascope? and what resolution and aspects should I use? Any other input is also appreciated.

Well, if you're going to put it on a DVD to watch on your tv then you'll want to go with a 4:3 ratio. This will be for full screen, not letter box. Most tvs support 800x600 resolution or 640x480, and I believe that the dpi is about the same as a monitor (72dpi) not really sure about that though. As far as letter box goes your aspect ratio will be 16:9 (correct me if I'm wrong here guys, but last I cecked this is letterbox.) So that would be roughly 800x380 or 640x300 as far as render resolution. One last thought...Bryce has set render sizes for all of the popular screen sizes. Unfortionately the preview window doesn't size to them as well :( or at least I don't know how to do it! Hope that helped! Jared

Just to give you a hint, Bryce will render no faster on a P4 than on your current machine. The speed is a limitation of the render engine code not the system it runs on. So if you wish to go with a faster machine, it should be for reasons other than faster render times in Bryce.

Second, To create a project on the scale you are proposing, to store the animation as single JPG frames is, for want of a better word, insane. First it makes compiling and editing a monumental task. second you will spend enormous amounts of time just keeping a catalog of all the image sequences. Also have you considered how you will apply sound and sound effects, or dialog? Editing is a laborious process even with short scene takes. I would suggest that you render out full frame non compressed AVI scene takes. The storage requirements will be huge still. Keep your takes between 10 and 30 seconds and edit them in that fashion. Maya fusion and adobe premier / after effects work best in this mode. Once you have the full length assembled and the sound track laid down. You can use a number of DVD codecs to create the DVD stream. Quicktime Pro allows you to convert an AVI or Move to a DVD stream and it costs only 29 dollars. It is much easier to work with 10 to 30 second AVI clips than fiest having to assemble a couple hundred frames at a clip.

I was planning on letterbox or an alternative. Thanks Jared. And thank you pnevai. I had no idea about Bryce's rendering engine. And as far as managing the image sequences, that was pretty much what I had in mind. I just wasn't sure what software to try. I'll give them a shot and hopefully sometime this decade I will have made progress. Thanks alot! Little steps... Lead to giant leaps...