HD frame size

[bhchllc]

I'll add one more "simple" technique that makes everything very easy. If working in After Effects, do all of your compositing at 854x480 with square pixels. Everything looks normal, no distortion, etc. When everything finished, create a new comp that is 720x480 with a pixel aspect ratio of 1.2 (widescreen). Nest the original 854x480 comp into the new one and voila, everything is set to go anamorphic. Use the original 854x480 for writing out quicktimes or whatever and the 720x480 comp to go to DVD for encoding.

[MoonDoggie]

At our studio here are our render sizes:

output to?
DVD: 720x480 (pixel aspect 1.0)
LowHD: 1280x720 (pixel aspect 1.0)
HighHD: 1920x1080 (pixel aspect 1.0)

We do everything in LowHD (which even on lower end systems is manageable if you optimize your settings well enough.

We always render to 1.0 par and let our compositing programs take care of the squishing etc. It's been good to us.

[paulison]

I would agree not to render at 1080p (HD) unless it is going on TV as a HD animation. For DVD its just going to take you forever to render without much quality increase.

For DVD's i would do as Panthon said but the PAL version of it (from memory i think we use 720x576 @ 1.422). The frames come out looking squished but when you play the DVD back on a player, it gets corrected back to the proper proportions. I've found with this way of working, the end result looks like it was a higher resolution rendering but also plays back very smoothly - smoother than if you just spit out frames with an aspect ratio of 1.0 in my experiences anyway