We all wonder how they do movies like "Final Fantasy" or "Jurassic Park". This might be it.... A 2-hour animation played at 30 frames per second is composed of nearly 250,000 frames. If each frame takes an hour to render all the 3D objects using photoreal colors and raytracing, then that process will take 250,000 hours to complete. Enter batch network rendering.... if you are on a network you can borrow time on other computers to share the work load, substantially reducing the time to process. If you have at least 60 computers the process will take less than 6 months !!!

Caligari Batch Network Rendering

Of course most animations that can be downloaded from the net are mere seconds long. So batch rendering may not be necessary. But it IS cool. :-)