We can use the storyboard to create 3D animations and in that case, we have to render multiple images, which will clearly take longer than a single snapshot. So what affects the rendering time for a movie?

First, everything mentioned above concerning high-resolution snapshots is also valid for animations. So again, the data resolution and image resolution both affect the time it takes to render individual frames.

Additionally, when exporting animation we have a few additional options:

The first two, file name and video format, have no significant effect on production time. They are just necessary because, unlike snapshots that will be relatively small and can be held in memory before we save them, movies create much larger file sizes.

We mentioned the video resolution and data resolution above, and clearly, this will have an effect. Note also that if your animation also includes progressions through time then the system will have to load each time point it renders which will also increase the total processing time.

But now we have one more setting, which is the framerate. This defines how many individual images the render will produce. If your animation is 10s long, and your production framerate is 30FPS, the software will need to render 10x30=300 images. So, if the software takes 2 seconds, not including the loading time, to render 1 frame, it will need 600 seconds (10min) to render the full movie. If instead, we render at 10FPS we only need to render 100 images and the production time will be about 3 minutes. Note that reducing the frame rate also leads to significantly smaller file sizes.

In most cases, a framerate of 25FPS is ample for smooth animations. For smaller videos that fit more easily in a slide deck reducing the framerate to 10FPS may be acceptable. The video will not be as smooth, but this may be enough for the purposes.

When rendering videos for visualization in a 360 video that people might look at through a headset a higher framerate may be preferable to reduce the flicker effect, but you will also need to use a very performant video player to ensure it is capable of playing back the larger amounts of data at the increased frame rate.