bandwidth, schmandwidth. :^) You've got several options: a-) make a visible light for each fire. In the "edit light..." dialog box, there's a little triangle pull-down menu: one of the options is "surface visible light" and another is "volume visible light". I prefer the quality of the volume visible lights, but the surface visible lights render much faster. b-) skip the light entirely and just make an orange object (sphere, cylinder, cones are good) with ambience set to 100. This only works if your overall ambient setting (in the Sky&Fog pane) is set to something fairly bright -- it won't work with dark ambient colors set in the sky tab. c-) combine the two: make a non-surface-visible light and an object with its ambient set really high. Option (b) requires very little rendering power, so your image will finish quickly. Options (a) and (c) will drastically slow down the render if you have a lot of teeny tiny fires. Things you can do to speed up the render: -- use squared fall-off on the lights (again, it's under the little triangle pull-down in the "edit light" dialog box) -- better yet: use ranged fall-off mode -- surface-visible lights render much faster than volume-visible lights, but it might not make much of a difference if the lights are really tiny. Things you can do to improve quality (but they'll take a hefty toll on the render time) -- use a volume visible light with "infinite light" set and squared fall-off -- use a volumetric material for the glowing fire -- or for the ultimate slowdown, use both. cheers, flick