Scrambling Distance and Dithered Sobol are enough to half the samples on most scenes.
Persistent Data is a huge time saver when you dont have animated mesh. compared to minutes of bvh building the render just starts instantly
We have a lot of in house tools to manage assets and things like that… We had thousands of cars all instanced with motion on top of that was tricky
The opening shot in this is entirely cgi… With post of course