Hi GroundBird,
I don’t know much about textures (animated or not) but you can check out this live stream where Kent Trammell sets up an animated Fire Texture.
https://cgcookie.com/live_streams/animating-a-procedural-fire-texture
However, it is possible to use an image sequence or video as a texture for an object. That is quite common.
In regards to animating from Ortho to perspective, I asked this question a while ago and someone much smarter than me said “Yes it is possible but it isn’t very easy to do”. It has something to do with the different view matrices and then I just nodded and pretended I knew what was going on.
PNG is a good format for an image sequence because it has transparency and the file sizes aren’t too big. If you need to save out different passes (for compositing) or you need lossless compression (super high quality) then EXR is a better option.
You will need to render the project in a video format at the last step (final version), but generally while you are working on the project you will benefit from using images sequences. This makes it much faster when you only need to change a few frames you only need to render the few frames that you changed rather than the entire thing.
However, when you’re animating and you just need to see how your project is progressing, you might benefit from rendering a viewport animation straight to a video format. (because it is super fast to render the viewport and you can also send that video to somebody if needed)
Hope that helps.
