hey guys,
i need to do some batch render. it is taking a lot of time, and even though i keep it on in the night, it still is not enough time. so, i need to try and find a way to reduce this time. when i am running windows there are a lot of applications running in the background and with maya on as well; that takes up a lot of memory. and i only have 512MB. i have heard that maya can do batch render through DOS, and that should speed things up a lot.
i was looking through help files to try and find a way of doing this. but, i couldn't quite understand what they were saying.
so, i was hoping that someone over here can tell me what exactly i need to do in order to batch render in dos.
i have a windows xp, with ntfs file system. i need to render in mental ray. all the options are set and saved in render globals. the format is tga. maya has been installed in the default directory.
so, can you tell me from which folder i need to give the command? (maybe programfiles?) and also, the exact format of the command??
i don't know too much about rendering. (as must be obvious to you from this post ). and almost nothing about mentalray.
also, is tga the right format to render in? and then, how can i convert this image sequence to a clip? can i make a divx file? i have old premier 5.5, but it renders really horrible looking clips. is there any free software that i can download from the net that i can use?

i would really appreciate if you can help me out...