How best to make a clip of a burning house? I plan to make a clip of a burning house in Blender. My objective is to make this photorealistic as possible. Now I think I can model the house and its environment (including the right materials and textures) and set it on fire and make an animation of that. 

But recently I had some first experience with the movie clip editor and the camera tracking possibilities of Blender. And now I think maybe you could also make a movie of a house (with a camera) and also make an animation of a 3D model on fire and integrate the original movie and the Blender made animation.

So my question is what would be the best approach. Either the "modelling approach" or the "VFX approach" ??? The house should be a typical "american suburban house".

I hope that this is not a subjective question. If it is, maybe some people are willing to give me some advice in the chat room ?
Feasible to do this on footage, with caveats. A few quick and ridiculous thoughts:


A pretty decent estimation of the scene referred transform for your footage. Absolutely mandatory, otherwise it is the nasty After Effects Hacks-All-The-Way-Down approach.
Good deal of reference photos of the house in question. You'd be needing these for the texturing, lighting, and supplementing the geometry I'd suspect.
A very compelling fire sim.


If the goal is absolute mimesis, most should be able to deduce that using photogrammetry techniques coupled with real footage is going to be infinitely more plausible than any from-scratch approach.

That said, no easy task by a long shot, but likely only feasible using real world footage coupled with CGI.