I am not asking what is the highest sample you have ever used, everyone can go insane on it on some passion project.
I am asking DURING PRODUCTION…what is the highest sample you have ever used for:
1: interior STILL image.
2: Animation
I believe I once did 20000 samples in Cycles for a “production” (help sell the product we’re offering with a nice image, not your typical interior/archviz shots) still image. It didn’t have daylight coming in, but it was an office space (single room!) with light coming in from the hallway in addition to 46 (fake’ish) spotlights, a bunch of area lights and fake bounce lights. This was prior to denoise and filmic, only 2.2 million faces (lots of instancing), quite complex materials all around which did feature some optimizations (GI diffuse tricks and so on). No baking was used because the project was living. It was a nightmare because of all those tiny spots in combination with big area lights and fake bounce lights.
Typically I end up with about 1000-2500 samples for a Cycles render (with denoise), in some cases 200-500 may even be enough (with denoise).
Currently, I think Eevee may be the way to go, despite its material (in)capabilities - looking at you; bevel and anisotropic (interaction with light, not so much actual reflections) shading 
I find Eevee very hard to use, every time I use it I spend hours trying to figure out show stopping problems - maybe it’ll come with some experience.
For long space walkthrough animations (haven’t had to do those yet because of the rendertimes), I’m seriously looking into just using Workbench renderer with AO. Sometimes when “they need a render”, a screenshot from Solidworks is actually all they really need.
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Thanks for the insights. I often feel like I am guessing at things like this.
Most of our animations we render at 80-100 samples with denoising on.
That being said, if we do have to do high samples, we usually render multiple times and average it out in the editor program we are using (say render 3 x 100sample images with different seeds, then each render is 33% of the final output)
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last week i had a freelance work, it’s a 30 sec of a commercial for tv, in interior scenes i used 1024 samples ( because we have a character with hair and sss for the skin ) + denoise and for outdoor i used between 256 & 350 samples with denoise, 1920*1080 resolution, this is the highest samples i used in an animation production.
For archviz stills i use between 256 & 1024 + denoise, i generally dont go up more than 1024
That’s a great idea about doing several passes with different noise seeds.
What do you composit them with? AE? Nuke?
Whatever editor we are using for the project… recently we have been using a bunch of davinci resolve.