I mean, I just wrote simple mandelbrot animation program, and it renders at ~5 seconds per 640x480 frame. Imagine the pain of waiting for just 500 frames.....
OK I am going to have a little rant now
- Because When I rendered trip to e214, the final frame alone - took longer to render than the whole of your animation would have - even if you had finished it.
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1908224&server=vimeo.com&fullscreen=1&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=01AAEAAltogether, it took just over a month to render the whole thing! (imagine that pain!) Like Sockratease, I have an offline machine that is dedicated to rendering whilst I use a laptop for all my other fractal creating and surfing needs. Patience is undoubtedly a true virtue when rendering fractal animations.
I have created animations before and cut corners to speed up render time such as - not anti-aliasing - less iterations - lower rez - and once they are finished I have found that I just don't like what I see. The satisfaction that I gain from doing the animation is just not enough for me. I feel like I have wasted my time and my computers cpu/gpu.
On the other hand, when I have gone the other way - ie - max anti-aliasing - max iterations - HD rez - the resulting animation is of such quality I find myself actually glowing inside, I get this crazy feeling that feels like its going to burst right out of me! - Its like a drug. Comments I receive on the videos reflect how I feel inside about the animation. People know quality when they see it.
The result is an animation I can watch over and over again. And every time I watch it there are no niggling voices in my head saying "imagine how amazing this would be if this was anti-aliased" or "imagine all the extra detail you would see if this was in HD" No, my brain's to busy soaking in all the rich crisp clear detail to start criticizing.
So where as it may take much much longer to render at the highest quality (I could have rendered trip to e214 in less than 3 days) I would rather wait a month and have something so very special, than wait just 3 days and end up with something that is just simply a waste of space on my hard drive - something that I just end up deleting.
(although from what you say even three days is a long time by your standards)
I would dare to say to you to try creating something that takes that extra length of time. See if the extra quality in the result gives you the satisfaction that I have experienced.
(be warned - you may never go back)
Of course there is a place for low its/res aliased animations - and that is when you need a preview for an anim, so you can see how it flows, and check that it is going to run correctly. For example before rendering e214 at my maximum quality settings, I rendered a low quality version in 3 days first (as seen below) to give me a better idea what it would look like, and to see if I needed to make any changes
http://www.youtube.com/v/pT_wdYg2AxA&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1Imagine if I had stopped there.
that was it,
finished product.
In my mind it would have been a pointless exercise.
What did I get out of it?
let me tell you -
I got about 2000 views over the space of a year and about 3-4 comments.
Well thats just great huh?
what about the high quality version that took a month to render?
what did I get out of that? let me tell you -
I got over 200,000 views.
It was embedded on over 100 websites,
and has lead to literally hundreds and thousands of comments and discusions from maths to physics and life in general,
It lead to my blog visitors jumping from 50 visitors a day to over 3000 visitors a day.
It lead to much money as I have been asked to do more commissioned/paid work than I am able to handle,
(thinking of all the new hardware/software that is now within my reach is a buzz in itself)
but more important to me than all of any of that -
It gave me that warm glowy feeling of satisfaction inside that absolutely nothing else can ever give me.
P.S. I will leave you with another one of my animations that I nearly cut corners on - but was oh so glad that in the end I did not..... and remember, How you learn patience is ultimately up to you - I learnt through the experience of the pay off at the end.
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1814664&server=vimeo.com&fullscreen=1&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=01AAEAI just wish you could see it the way I do (lossless
)