In the case of the sequence made for Red Doors, a low-budget indie feature, the original plan was to finish at DV resolution. But as production progressed and the film was accepted into more festivals, an online HD version was needed and I had to up-res my titles. For the main title sequence, I had to move the animation into a larger document that matched the HD settings, but I had to render the titles by themselves without the background footage so that when the color-corrected final footage was ready, the titles could be placed over the footage.
Which leads to a concern about time. In 2005, I had been working on an older Mac G4 with a meager 2 GB of RAM. I believe I was running After Effects 7 at the time. Renders of the complete title sequence took about eight hours. Now, my little Macbook Pro with 4 GB of RAM and a dual 2.5 gHz Intel processor could run circles around that, but at the time it caused me to raise some concern. I warned my clients that any major changes that forced me to render the complete sequence again meant that we’d lose an entire business day waiting for the old Mac to putt-putt along.
