> Are you finding the full HD renders to take an extraordinary amount of hard > disk space?
Full HD is about 6 times the amount of pixels, so you have 6 times more data in theory. With compression this can be less, but I always had uncompressed as a master format. Ofcourse lossless compressed for rendering. It used to require faster storage, such as 15000 rpm SCSI drives, which were very expensive for limited capacity – at some point 2000 euro for 73Gb, which could hold about 20 minutes of uncompressed tiffs in full HD. I remember doing a production like that with two such drives travelling back and forth between studio and recording lab in different countries. So yes, it was an issue at the time. Nowadays even cheap consumer disks are fast enough and are often 1Tb and over. It’s not a huge deal anymore. But resolution isn’t the only thing that changed - every step in your workflow can be affected one way or other. The 8bit images from the past are now HalfFloat or Float Exrs, and a single pass became a few passes to a whole lot of them - which in turn makes for more complex compositing. The higher resolution puts a higher demand on the detail and complexity of scenes and assets you work with. Techniques and software changed, there is now caching which can easily take up more disk space than renders. Workflows changed, with other policies on versioning and milestones. I find that these other factors have a higher impact and consequences than the simple step up to a higher resolution. But I wouldn’t want to scare you away from fullHD, quite the contrary. I found the move to HD quite smooth, rewarding, and I never wanted to go back to SD with all its weird little issues. We’ll see where we’re at in ten years – with all the talk about 4k and more, but I don’t believe HD will be obsolete, while SD will be quite marginal.
