Hello Ed, Hi-res can mean many things! Not knowing what your settings are, doubling the size of an image can result in 4 times the render time. Before I kick of my hi-res stuff I try to minimize settings as much as possible. Unless there is some deep transparency, I reduce the ray settings to 4 vs. the default 8 and un-check all of the options I don't need (Light through trans, refraction, etc.)Why make Carrara do the math for rays I don't need. Also, changing the anti-aliasing settings from Fast to Best will cause a huge render time increase. Good is usually good enough. Same thing for the Global Illumination options. Can you see the image render progressing? If it's not advancing, I you might be the lucky winner of a rendering crash. I actually just had this happen in one of my renders because I moved a shader texture map prior to rendering. Carrara started but couldn't find the map and hung. The system was going full speed but since it couldn't locate the map, it didn't progress. Moving things back where they were fixed the problem, although I had to restart the render. Good luck! Mark