Animation rendering - guidelines for good rendering

[theAVator]

Just looking for general guidelines for various renderings situations. Obviously, this would change slightly based on specific instances and hardware setup. However, there must be some general rules to keep in mind to base render quality decisions from, right?

*Caveat* - I don't need to do any ultra-hi-res renderings, nothing 4k quality, etc. most of my stuff ends up in PPT training presentations, or small animations/videos (again, usually not even HD quality). Most images I'm outputting are 1024x768, most animations are 1280x720.

Currently, I am rendering an animation that's 1280x720
I have my settings set to:
24 samples
24 ray bounces
Anti alias - 1
shadow - 2
pixel blur - 1.2
But it's only processing about 3.2 frames per hour which seems slow.

Is that over-kill, under-kill, odd... anything? I guess I don't really know what the ratio between samples and rays should be, should they be equal, should one be higher than the other, after a certain point does an increase in one produce only a minimal increase in quality, if rendering an animation is there a point at which a certain value produces only minimal increase in quality, at one point does the render time increase to a point where it makes the selected output less feasible, etc.

Just looking for good general guides to follow. (For Example 2:1 ratio of samples to rays, or don't go above X number of rays for an animation, or less samples but more rays for animation, or max samples will get you a better output and take less time, etc)

Just for reference, I work on a Dell T7810 (16 core Xeon, 32GB RAM, no network rendering)
Any advice would help. Thanks!

[Esben Oxholm]

I always use the max samples when rendering animations (or max time if schedule is tight)

I usually start by rendering out a single frame at the resolution that I need using max sample at e.g. 1000 samples. I let it sit until I'm satisfied with the result and note the percentage in the lower right corner. If it e.g. says 10% when everything is looking great then I'll render the entire animation with the max samples at 100 (200 if 20% and so on).

I think that way I get the quality I need without "over-rendering" things.

I'm also very interested in hearing the workflow of you other guys.