I've started playing with preview 2 version of Xgrid http://www.apple.com/acg/xgrid/ . After reading through the example on POV rendering it lead me to thinking that it would be a reasonaly easy exercise for an accomplished coder to adapt the process to divide a rendering task into several smaller tasks, each to run in parallel, and then distribute these across an xgrid cluster.

Using command line tools like ffmpeg, mpeg2enc etc it should be possible to script a rendering workflow from, say, a DV or mov to several .m2v and sound files.

Has anyone got several macs (we have two PowerBooks and an iMac DV400) that they'd like to try this on? I will make a first attempt next week, but I'm no great shakes at perl or shell scripting

Let me know by a post on this forum if you'd like to contribute ideas, beta testing,anything else.