For me, it depends… If I know it’s going to take more than a few minutes to render a full animation (something that frequently happens for me when I do a Cycles render), I’ll render the frames and then edit them together. Like some of the others have mentioned, there’s very little more frustrating than having something render for hours only for something to fail along the way and having to start all over again. If you render the frames as output, if it fails halfway through, you only have to render the one that failed and the remaining images. If I know the full animation can be rendered in 10-15 minutes tops (often the case if I’m rendering using Eevee), I’ll just go ahead and render as a movie.
