What kind of render are you talking about? It sounds like you are talking about finished, high quality images. And of course, it's going to take what time it takes. I'm only vaguely familiar with the playblast feature in Maya, but SoftImage has a similar function called flip book, which just pumps out frames, kind of like your 3D view will show you in semi-real time what's going on when you play the animation. I want something like that -- not for looking nice, but for doing quick output of movement/animation issues. I need to output because I am in the middle of a work pipeline, so someone else edits after me... Does that make sense, or am I explaining myself poorly?