Useful Values and Standards

Micah Denn — February 15, 2015

Duncan Mc kean made a useful post on his blog about common poster sizes and a reference table of their 300dpi pixel sizes.

I’d like to follow that up by making this page a library of useful standards and values for myself and fellow artist.

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Focal Lenghth

Trying to match your 3D camera to a reference image or just find the right look for your scene? This is a list of common focal lengths used in the real world.

Prime Lens / Fixed Focal Length
Ultra-Wide	18mm, 20mm
Wide	24mm, 28mm, 35mm
Standard	50mm
Short Telephoto	85mm
Telephoto	105mm, 135mm
Super Telephoto	200mm, 300mm, 400mm

35mm and 50mm are always safe bets. 50mm is personally my favorite lens for portraits.

Zoom Lens / Variable Focal Length
Ultra-Wide	10-15mm
Wide	15-28mm
Standard	28-40mm
Short Telephoto	40-60mm
Medium Telephoto	60-135mm
Long Telephoto	135-300mm
Super Telephoto	<300mm

F/Stop

If your rendering with depth of field then these commonly used f/stop values are a useful starting point for finding the best settings.

(lower values = shorter depth of field)

F/Stop
22
16
11
8.0
5.6
4.0
2.8
2.0
1.4

Image Resolutions

Square
256
512
1024
2048
4096
8192
16384
32768

16:9
Width	Height
640	360
864	486
960	540
1024	576
1280	720
1600	900
1920	1080
2048	1152
4096	2304
5180	2880
7680	4320

4:3
Width	Height
640	480
800	600
960	540
1024	768
1280	960
1400	1050
1600	1200
3200	2400
4000	3000
6400	4800

Other useful aspect ratios

• Paper (A series) - 1.14:1
• IMAX - 1.43:1
• Analogue 35mm film - 3:2
• European widescreen – 5:3
• US widescreen – 1.85:1
• Current widescreen cinema standard – 2.35:1

Video Codecs & Containers

Codecs and containers can be a fairly complex subject. I'm not going to make a full list but here are my go to options.

• h.264 with Mp4 or MKV (MP4 has slightly better support than MKV)
• WebM if you’d like an open source option.

Useful IOR Values

I just picked out a few common ones, if you need more there’s a much more extensive list here.

Material	IOR
Aluminium	1.44
Asphalt	1.635
Bronze	1.18
Copper	1.10
Diamond	2.417
Glass (average)	1.51714
Gold	0.47
Nylon	1.53
Silver	0.18
Steel	2.50
Water (room temp)	1.33157

What else?

This isn’t by any means an exhaustive list, I’m just getting started. I need your help to expand this page with things that are useful to all of us.

So… what have I missed?

Throw a comment down bellow or give me a shout @micah_denn on twitter and we’ll add your suggestion!