Sway, thanks for the tip on grayscale thru HSV node. Certainly any bitmapped image can be turned into grayscale in post production very easily by desaturation. Even in animation, entire folders of lossless bitmap images could be batch desaturated. But....what about saving original render time???? Let's say you were doing an animation, wanted the video completely and strictly in grayscale only.....a 'noir' film.....and one of your goals (besides the 'look') was speedy render times due to limited pixel depth in grayscale. Would setting all elements with HSV saturation = 0 result in faster renders???? Or, can you or anyone think of a different approach, with goal to reduce render time on an animation. ::::: Opera :::::