OT: Totally P!ssed off at UPN

[Jack Simth]

1)
5->1 rendering time is perfectly acceptable for 45 minutes of professional footage for a 13 episode season one season per year; use low-quality renderings for testing, then let the final run overnight. If it is an issue, you can speed things up by using more computers on a high-quality LAN in a Beowolf cluster (I had a class on it in college - fun stuff - whole new ways to lock up a machine). Run a Linux-based system to help prevent lockups.

2)
I've never rendered video, but I record TV shows on my PC; mpeg-4 Fast Motion works wonders for the file size - at 15 frames/sec, 2700 kbits/second, 48 kh stereo sound, I get an hour long show stored in about a gigabyte, with little danger of errors crashing the capture, and have rather good image quality - and I've only got a little PIII with 128 MB of RAM running Lose98. A little compression can do wonders.
And, ya know, with 200 GB hard drives being fairly common nowadys in the $2000 machine price range, space isn't an issue. If you arrange a filing system that can handle it, it doesn't matter that you burn through 4 GB in 5 minutes (I did this a few times when recording TV on my computer - I had the settings WAY TOO HIGH) - a full 60 minute episode is only 12 5-minute blocks; with the above ratio, that's 48 GB - you can store 4 of those on a 200 GB hard drive, available for purchase at most computer stores.

Yeah, the recourse requirements for video can get pretty high - but modern equipment can get a lot higher fairly readily anymore.