I hope someone can help. I want to render an animation for the Halloween contest. I'm wondering what the best size is for rendering. Also, what's the best size for DVD quality rendering?
 Thanks in advance.

   JoeE

oh boy.

does the contest specify the target resolutions?

If not, then what other uses do you have for nit? BEcause the question is general enough, so the answer will be general: Whatever you like to use it for, that's what dictates the ideal rendering resolution. If you plan to post it on youtube or kyte or similar places, and want to see the 'HD' button there too, then you had better render and upload an HD res. Like 720p (1280x720 progressive). If you want to play it in full HD on big screen, 1080p (1920x1080). If you are a gamer and want to push it to the full extent of your monitor's capability, 1920x1200, well that's the answer. And of course if you prefer to target users of devices like iPhone, iTouch, others in .3gp format around 200-400 pixels, pick a few of these.

I recommend rendering high so you can resize&resample down to lower reses too. The opposite doesn't always give you satisfactory results, to say the leats.

If you have just one video size you want to render to try 1280x720 if using wide format. Or 1280xwhatever in 4:3 ratio case. Then use ffmpeg or other tools (www.thebest3d.com/ffmpeg for examples) to convert & resample down.

Youtube and others (Animato.com) can accept high-res clips and feed them in standard as well as HD with the click of a button by the person viewing it.

Attached Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A62_I7FsMEY&feature=channel

Thanks Staigermanus. For the contest they want a 60 second or less clip to be under 10MB. I started a test render at 640X480p. It's taking about 8 minutes per frame to render. I'd like to have at least 30 seconds in the clip. Not too worried about HD on this one but eventually I'd like to do some better animations and save them to DVD. Check the link if you'd like to see some of my earlier animation attempts.

 Thanks again,
    JoeE

so you're not just asking about pixel size but also disk size? 10 MB... you'll want to save to H.264 or similar (mpeg4, divx). Not at initial rendering, but with conversions later. You can easily fine tune the rendered clip's conversion with ffmpeg, trying various quality parameters like

-qscale 2
-qscale 3
-qscale 4

etc... to see at what point you get below 10 MB and still have good quality.
http://www.thebest3d.com/ffmpeg  has info on ffmpeg and WinFF, a free front end which uses ffmpeg (includes it, actually), in case you don't like the CLI (command line interface)

Thanks again. I'll check the site and try your suggestions.

 JoeE