Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
>   There is a practical example which, while not extremely common, is
> nevertheless very plausible: Rendering a widescreen DVD video.
....
>   Another practical example is a 4:3 monitor with a non-4:3 resolution
....

Yes, I didn't want to go into detail on these. To the best of my knowledge
you're perfectly right on these issues, and a good deal of them is already
mentioned in the FAQ.


> > * Frame Count:
>
> > Instead of using the 0.00-to-1.00 clock, animations may instead use the
> > frame_number for timing reference. In that case, it may be desirable to specify
> > the number of frames not on the command line, but in the SDL file, either to be
> > warned if different values are specified on the command line, or to always
> > override those values.
>
>   I think that causes problems with the frontend-backend division in
> POV-Ray 3.7. The backend, ie. the rendering engine, cannot affect the
> rendering settings (such as animation settings). It's the frontend which
> determines these settings.
>
>   The reason for this is, among other things, support for distributed
> rendering. Distributing, for example, an animation among different machines
> is a duty of the frontend. The frontend cannot do that if the animation
> settings are determined in the SDL file (possibly inside complex scripting,
> which can only be determined by parsing and interpreting the entire file).

This may be true when we're talking about overriding the values; however, even
then it would still allow for checking and *warning* about mismatches in scene
vs. command line / .ini file settings.

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