Rendering animations, and the settings used, are going to be different in many scenes. It also depends on what you are looking for out of it. As BB demonstrated, motion blur can be used, but it is not always used or even necessary in some scenes. The type of lighting used can drastically effect the required render settings as well. Using strong IDL lighting is not going to work out well at low render settings and will show unacceptable lighting differences from frame to frame even with high render settings if it is the primary light source.

Depending on the output quality you want, you may not even have to use the Firefly part of the render engine. I have done many animations that were simply rendered out to preview, others have used Firefly with settings as high as 12 pixel samples to reduce artifacting to acceptable levels. If you can get acceptable frames using the preview render, it is going to render a frame very quickly compared to even the lowest Firefly settings. On my workstation I can get 4 or 5 frames a second using the preview render settings. On scenes requiring 12 pixel samples, each frame can take 20 minutes or more depending on the complexity.

Most render engines are a compromise of speed versus quality, and you will have to experiment with that balance. Settings that work fine with one animation are going to be different than the next one more often than not.

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