Quote - Using JPG as an intermediate format is a bad, bad idea. The quality loss seams like a waste to me. That aside, renderign to TIF shoudln;t take any longer than JPG. Output format doesnt come into play at the render stage.

That has not been my experience.  I've found the quality makes a difference in speed, at least when using the "make movie" options.

JPG is NOT an intermediate format for me when I'm animating.  It's the only format my animation software accepts.  So if Poser can't do it, I have to convert each frame with Photoshop. 

I mostly make small animated graphics for Web sites and such.  It's pointless to render to TIFF format, when I'm only going to convert the frames to JPG anyway, and then convert to something even more lossy.