Quote - Yes, dvlenk, I've been perusading myself of that. just go for speed and good general shadows with the Max scanline render engine, as fast as possible for animation. Then apply these desaturation and grain effects in AfterEffects. Voila!

I was using the scanline renderer a lot (for animated camera walk throughs) before I switched over to real-time for that. I don't use it so much anymore, except to pre-render radiosity for the real-time GI.
It makes nice shadows, and even raytraced ones are real quick. As I said, avoid the adv. lighting if you're after speed.
There is a 'film grain' render effect that it can use. It's an RGB noise a lot like the gaussian noise filter in Photoshop. Maybe that would work for you, when you desturate it will wipe out the noise color saturation too.

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