My Work Project from the last 6 Months is coming to a conclusion and I'm no longer doing the 12-14 Hour Days.

Now I'd like to resume the Music Video I was planning on doing... it is Retro related in relation to the 8-Bit Computer scene.

Long story short.. I cant decide on the Format.   Before I put all this time and effort into it.. I'd like to settle on a Screen Resolution and Frame Rate and go with it.

The more I've read on the subject the More confused I'm getting.  there are all kinds of Frame Rates like 25FPS, 29.97FPS  than I've heard about Rendering at something like 60-90FPS and than reduce that down to 30FPS to get a silky smooth look.
 
Than there is resolution .. There is 640x480 letter Box or 1920x1080 HD.
 
Any suggestions??

Well I guess you could try and find something in the format you'd like to use and then check out the properties on the advanced summery..

Thats the thing, I was thinking of Rendering each frame to a .BMP or .TIFF or .PNG some kind of Loseless format, and than edit and assemble into video using video editing software like Sony Vegas Video.

So its important to set the Resolution / Frame Rate right from the get go.

Example DVD would limit me to 720x480 29.97FPS NTSC or 720x488 25FPS (PAL)

I can also go the High Definition route and release a PC Watchably only format of 1920x1080 at 30FPS.
 
I'm probably over thinking this, but since doing the animation and rendering itself is such a long process, that I dont want to have to re-do or backtrack half way through the project.

Hi there
You can render it from bryce to uncompreesed AVI - that would be lossless - however - you cant stop rendering at a given time and then pick up rendering again later. Bryce doesn't allow that.
You can chose the approach of rendering frame by frame to BMP - that would give you the possibility to pick up rendering at any given frame in the animation. I've made a 20 sec animation in 800*600 render with 255 in quality on a quad core 2,9 ghz pc doing nothing else - it took a week to render !!!!!! - Now maybe the quality setting is overkill as animation alwyas introduces some kind of bluring - so maybe one could settle with a lesser quality ..haven't experimented with that. As for the framerate most standalone players and/or PC's can play the videos with the proper framerate for the particular country - good luck with you animation and may you be patient :-)

Best Regards
Aren

Whatever format, or aspect ratio you choose; I also can vouch for the use of rendering to bmp. If you have a long animation, and a storm, or accident, or an occasional burp by the local power grid interrupts your "juice", you still have the bitmap seq stills already rendered safe in a file.  Unlike a video file, you can resume rendering the rest of the file. I render in stills, and I have some hefty APC surge/ battery things. It's really helped to preserve my computers. Quite a few reasonably priced apps can convert  bmp sequences into a video file. Maybe there's even a freeware app out there that I'm not aware of. Of, course, I'm not sure which video app you're using, so you may already have it covered if you try this method.

Another cool thing to consider is that if you are used to image editors, you can easily rotoscope a quick added animation, such as lightning, or a blaster beam, Hey, if it's good enough for ICM, it's good enough for me. Postwork to accentuate your Bryce animation is totally legit, especially for a rock video. You can just adjust your lighting animation to synch with your video. I just render to thirty fps, uncompressed, and start from there. It is quite easy to convert to any needed framerate too, It is always, a great idea to back-up your uncompressed original source, and compress copies of it from there. I recommend trying different video compression schemes. Some schemes can really get your file sizes down, but they tend to smear or destroy the reds.

Oh, and one last thing, I think that rendering at the higher frame rates(60-120) would be "overkill' that would gain you very little for your extra render times. It might be fun to post some animation ideas. Good luck, and have fun.

Yes powerfailure is a killer when rendering direct to AVI from bryce - (I cant figure out why they haven't made  the possibility to stop and resume rendering to AVI's and for the matter rendering to disk - some old old old programs like Vista Pro 4 has that abillity)

Regarding freeware that can combine sequences of images i can recomend VirtualDubMod - im not absolutely sure that it can take BMP's - but many programs can batch-process converting of BMP's to JPG's - furthermore it can recompress to almost any given codec (that is if you have the codec installed of cause) - in my experience DivX and XviD codecs with a datarate of 2000 is almost as good as DVD quality

And yes ...have fun

Thanks for everyones input it is very much appreciated.

I will take the advice and make a generic scene and than do multiple versions and get opinions of which way to go.

All my PC's are on APC UPS Units so no worries about brown outs or powerloss.

I will be using 4 Systems that will be doing the core of the rendering.  2 x Single Core CPU's @ 2Ghz each with 2GB and 3GB of Ram. and 2 x 2 Core CPU's @ 2Ghz and 2GB of RAM Each.

A 5th PC (Slowest) will be used to delegate the actual render job since  the Latest version of Bryce does not Render when but only acts as a Server.

Bryce Lightning does not utilize 2 Core systems, so I may do some sort of Bryce/Carrara Hybrid.
 

Tht is not going to work - bryce is unforgiving ...one pc down in your renderfarm - and the whole thing goes bananarama

 I'd go for FullHD... but store the data uncompressed. Once time comes to compress just use your video editor program. Or maybe even use Gordain Knot or such for compression. Anything but bryce's own compression cuz it sucks

Quote - Tht is not going to work - bryce is unforgiving ...one pc down in your renderfarm - and the whole thing goes bananarama

Which version of Bryce are you referring to?

I've had 6 PC's rendering on Bryce 5.0 and v5.5 previously and I could add remove any Bryce node without any side effects.  But this was for Single Images and not Animation.  In the Render Manager screen you can stop/start any of the individual nodes.

I havent tried this in v6.1 Please tell me its not broken.

Quote - "Anything but bryce's own compression cuz it sucks".
Yeah, I would have to agree with Rayraz on that. Bryce's video compression is about as bad as its jpeg compression, which is naff. Full HD would have more shelf-life, and it is the more modern standard,  but if you are mixing in performance video of the band it should be of the same standard, or aspect ratio. If you're doing this for the web and Youtube you'll probably want to use 640x480.

 if you render an animation you dont need the networking option.. just render seperate sections on seperate machines. that way you wont lose the whole thing if one pc breaks down.

 if you have performance video.. just render exactly the same resolution and framerate as that :)

I use 6.1 - and have in 2 ocassions experienced that becaus one ot of three pc's stopped responding the whole animation was lost - guess its another thing when you start and stop a pc in the renderfarm  with purpose:-)

 As far as i understand, when rendering an animation, bryce lightning just sends different frames to different pc's. So what i meant was, you could do lightnings job by hand, not using lightning at all. thus avoiding the problem that it might crash.