Hi Guys and Gals... Wondering what opinions you might have regarding batch rendering using Lightning. I have tons of movies that need to be animated. So, Im thinking...I'll set up all the anims and render them while I'm away on Xmas vacation. Now, to do this...I think I need to use Lightning, which I have running now between the G3 and the G4. I should be able to add all the anims as jobs in the render manager, right? And it will render away while I'm out. Question: Do I need to have an active client to use the render manager to batch these animation jobs? Due to the fact that testing has shown that anims render faster without Lightning (Since Im using the g4 as the master), Im trying to figure a way to get all this work done...without having to rely on my unreliable G3 being up and running for two weeks straight. thoughts? Thanks Pope

If the G3 is that unreliable i suggest leaving it render on the G4 alone. Lightning with two mahines really isn;t that much of a speed boost unless they are both very fast machines. The host computer (yes, you need one computer to serve the render to the others with an open client) will render very slowly.

I'm amazed that you see no speed increase in using both machines. Run the client on the G4 with the render manager to set up all the things you want to render. Set up lightning on the G3. On the render manager select the option to optimise tiling, and the option to render on host. This should let your image render different tiles on both machines simultaneously, even if the g3 only does one tile to three or four on the G4 it should still give a speed boost.