I was wondering if this was the best way for simple flythroughs? Even just flat 8bit images at 25 fps mount up to a considerable size so im not sure how people stretch to 16 or 32bit multilayered files. Must be a nightmare?
Don't forget to activate compression when you are saving to sequence files.
- png - probably one of the smallest file sizes and has compression on by default, but slower to play, but that speed loss might be negligible depending on the computer, image content and resolution
- tiff has multiple types of compression. Packbits should be faster while LZW and ZIP should have a smaller file size but slower to play. Tiff has even a jpeg compression, but that is probably lossy while the previous mentioned ones are without any loss in quality.
- for 8 bit - targa or tga can also be an option, in my tests its RLE compression is the fastest to decode/play because it's not a zip like compression and takes better advantage of repeating colors in the image. And if you are compositing and save only a small smoke element in a big image and have the rest of the image black, file size can be super small like 100 KB for a full hd res.
- exr - can also have the RLE compression, which I'm guessing it's fast like in tga, and also has zip which I guess it's slower but makes smaller file sizes.