[rowe]

Originally Posted by Capt.ArD

the easy/ghetto way of doing this is to simply share the max scene file over your network. open it in each of your computers seperately. now you have 5 computers running independant of each other, all with the same scene loaded. then tell each computer to render a set of frames.

Computer 1- frames 1-50
Computer 2- 51-100
computer 3- 101-150
and so on...

now you have 20 little mini animations, which, when put together in a media program, form your final product.

inefficient and boring as you can get, but this is the most reliable way i can think of to render your stuff quickly.

To elaborate to this. Instead of output as movie files as suggested by Capt.ArD, you can make the output a .tga, .jpg, or .png sequence (.tga and .png should preserve transparency which can come in handy if you want to put effects behind your animation in post). What this does is it saves you animation as [filename][framenumber].[extention], then you can move all the files to the same folder and use a video editor to import the sequence. (I know this works in Adobe After Effects and it should work in others, just make sure it does before you spend the day rendering it.) The nice thing about .tga sequences is that they are uncompressed so then when you compress them in post, you get better quality than if you were to compress an already compressed video.