on my mac, even after Sr2.  I have a greenpotts school corridoor and about 6 laura and lukes.  A loretta lorez and a jessie all fully clothed as well as a couple of fully dressed M3s carrying things and a lorez daz guy as well.
Every time I try to render poser I get an out of memory error followed by a crash.  I wasn't doing a hi res render either.
Love esther

 I've loaded the very same scene into my old poserpro and I'm getting a message that it can't load some of the textures, however so far it hasn't crashed on attempting to render to queue
Love esther

You should set it to render in "separate process", if you haven't already. That will force poor little archaic 32 bit Poser 8 to create a Firefly render process independent of the Poser.exe process, and free up some system RAM for it to use. Or so goes the theory. Even so, a scene that large would be a problem for any 32 bit app, and if you already have separate process ticked off, no idea what else it could be.

 yes I already have separate processes ticked off and loads of ram.
Love esther

 I've loaded it iinto poser 7 and so far rendering okay.  I'm glad I kept poser 7 and never updated it with the latest SR.
Love esther

Well that's strange if you can render it in Poser 7 but not Poser 8, with separate process checked.
But in your first post you said Poser Pro, not Poser 7. Is that 64 bit Poser Pro? Because that would explain why it renders there and not in Poser 8.

At any rate, even in Poser 8 in a separate process, I think it would still choke on a scene using more than 2 GB of RAM.

 well poser 7 got half way and then crashed.  will try again.

 I am still trying poserpro (it's rendering to the queue thingy) - the old version of P7 upgrade.
And I am reloading into p7 as I forgot to check render in separate processes there.
Love esther

 it has completed rendering in poserpro.  well at least I know I can get my render now.  shame about poser 8.
I only have 32 bit macpro.  Wish I could get the 64 bit one.
Love esther

 It's also rendering nicely in poser 7 since I checked the separate processes box, but it WON'T RENDER in poser 8.
Love esther

Do you have the "smooth polygons" setting enabled in Firefly? That one can be a real render-killer with large scenes.

I have noticed that, for some reason, the version of Firefly that ships with Poser 8 seems to have problems when trying to smooth sharp edged, low-rez objects like walls, air-ducts, etc.

Post you render settings please,
and try reducing the bucket to 16.

Rendering in separate process starts FFRender.exe, but under Vista and Win7, it does not have the same reading rights of the Virtual Store as Poser.exe. (do not know for MAC)
With a bucket of 16, (even 8 if needed)  memory load would normally drop, and render faster.

 I did have smooth polys enabled. I will turn it off and try again.
If not - then I will post render settings. I did try turning bucket size to 8 already.
Love esther

It would be helpful to see the render settings.  It might be a combination of settings causing your problem.

 but I haven't tried it with smooth polysoff yet, so just trying that now.

 just trying this now.  Poser 8 crashes.
I can render same scene in poser 7 successfully.
Love esther

I would use much less lights and see if that helps.

oh, yeah, what is that?
For IDL, you only need one ligth. And perhaps one or 2 spots somewhere.
But this is realy something that needs a lot of cleaning, "read" deleting.

I saw you mentioning a Mac Pro. How many cores does it have? If it's rendering in more threads than Poser 7 (which is limited to 4), then it will inevitably require more memory for rendering, as each rendering thread requires its own chunk of memory for keeping the bucket buffer, micropolygons, shader state etc. You can try if it works when rendering using less threads.

At what point does it crash? Before the render, during or at the end?

If stewer recommendation rings true, you might consider using D3D's render script to control the number of threads within Poser's FFrender.

 Hi, I think I have it set on 4 - will set it on 2 and see what happens.
It crashes DURING the render.
Love esther