This is an extremely deep dive into the Mandelbrot set, to 2^316 (binary). In decimal that's 1E+95, or 1 with 95 zeros after it. The coordinates are identical to a similar deep zoom movie posted to YouTube by user metafis, but my version has higher resolution (648x480), and was rendered with 2x antialiasing (four pixels computed for every output pixel). It also has an improved palette, similar to the one used by the Wikipedia Mandelbrot page. The uncompressed version looks better of course--fractals are close to the worst case for video compression--but H.264 does surprisingly well.

NOTE: The MPEG2 version (300MB) is now available for download. Search for "Chris Korda" over at archive.org and you'll find it.

The video was rendered using my own fractal software, called Fractice, which supports distributed processing using a client/server architecture. The render took five months, using a cluster of up to 20 dual-core PCs on a LAN, all running the Fractice rendering server. The actual number of servers varied over the five-month period but averaged around 15. Rendering only occurred at night.

Fractice is a free, open-source fractal explorer/renderer for XP/Vista. It supports navigation, history thumbnails, previews, antialiasing, deep zoom, printing, posters, palettes, multicore and distributed processing, movie recording, undo/redo, color cycling, and job control. It also has VJ features, such as mixing, mirroring, origin motion, palette tweening, dual-monitor, and MIDI.

For more info and to download Fractice:
fractice.sourceforge.net