Hi All

I am doing a project which is very detailed and 4 minutes long, I need to render out high res images (1440X1152) @ 25 fps from two camera views. So I need to end up with 12000 high res images.

I use to have a PC with 1gb of ram and a 3 GB hyper-threading chip then in August last year I bought a new Dell with two duel processors and 2 GB of DDR2 ram two get quicker renders and guess what! The renders take almost twice as long.

After weeks of going between Dell and Alias they have put it down to a confliction between Maya 7 and duel core chips called Data contention and basically, tuff your stuck with it.

The guy from Dell did show me a way of telling Maya to render say frames 1 to 10 and tell that to use two of the cores and then reopen Maya and tell it to do frames 11-20 and to use a different two cores and you can do this up to four times so you have four different renders going all together and this does work out to be a bit quicker but not quick enough to render out 12000 high res frames.

I believe there is possibly about three options, someone did say I might be able to get a render card but he didn't have any more information, someone else talked about a render computer but again had no more information and I have heard about render houses where you send your project to them and they render it out for you but again I don’t know any more about this.

I would rather spend some money buying some sort of hardware then pay a render house every time I need some rendering done but I would be grateful for any ideas.
Thankss

Trikeman