BTW Michael,
If you havnt explored Simlabs animation system yet, I wanted to mention how much i like the concept... Looking forward to them maturing with it..

They render out a sequential bitmap first, then let you compile it after the fact... this gives me lots of power for editing and making small changes and such, after a 20 hr render... No need to re-render the clip!!!! It's a great system.. I think they are using an open source project to help with how they put that together also...

FYI.