I can't go into any specifics, but the general approach that most places use these days is to assign complete frames to each node on the renderfarm. The nodes

I can't go into any specifics, but the general approach that most places use these days is to assign complete frames to each node on the renderfarm. The nodes are multi-core and threads divvy up the work of rendering the image in tiles. That's not to say that production renderers can't do multi-process renders too, but you don't see it nearly as often as multi-threaded renders. Remember that it can often take several minutes just to read scenes in; even if you split up an image into individual pixels and gave each node just a single pixel to do there'd still be a limit to how quickly you could get a frame back. So if you parallelize across your cluster on frames, then yes, there's usually several hours latency for a frame sequence, but you also get much better throughput. By the way, if you haven't heard of Blinn's Law [0], you may find it interesting. [0] http://blog.boxxtech.com/2013/07/15/blinns-law-and-the-paradox-of-increasing-performance/ http://blog.boxxtech.com/2013/07/15/blinns-law-and-the-parad...