Huge fan of ES for many years now. While we're all eagerly awaiting the blessed golden flock, I've been working over the weekend on a little project that takes the current flock being sent to clients, and generates the loops and edges being sent out in 1920x1200 (macbook pro retina) with 600 numframes instead of the usual 150. It takes our HPC cluster about 20 minutes to render each animation at 2000 quality, including the mp4/avi generation. They look glorious when I proxy them into the current app.
Here's a handful of samples of the loops. Make sure you download the videos instead of viewing them in Dropbox's web player (which reduces them to a horrible quality level.)
If I really get a wild hair, I might set another workflow up to generate UHD (4k) animations as well, though I have doubts that the present screensaver would be able to display them.
It's exciting to see recent changes here, and I'm looking forward to Gold Sheep!
Hey now Peppernicus - would you be interested in renting out any of your cluster's CPU cycles? I currently render all of my flames at 1920x1080 to be used in videos, but with the few older machines I have I can only put out about 30 seconds of HD video per day... I definitely would pay to reduce day renders down to minutes.
Here is an example of the video work I do - the rendering for this 15 minute piece is done and the music I commissioned for it is still in production - www.hightail.com/download/bXBieEVRTXZxRTNvS3NUQw ... the video has been compressed to online streaming standards for 1080p HD content. The flames for this one were generated during a month long Kickstarter art project (1 a day for 30 days, so the project was called A Flame A Day [AFAD])... the video is the animation of the flames.
I've given this a fair bit of work over the weekend, and nearly have something I can share with you all. It should be as simple as a config change to add a proxy server in the electric sheep saver options.