I read some place, that when you use let`s say 3 instances of AM to render a scene
you can put the first instance to render every 1, next every second, third every third frame.

Somehow it escapes me, what the great advantage of this procedure would be compared to
leting the first render the first 50 frames, the second the next 50 and the third the last fifty.

Is there any advantage and if what is it?

I haven't tested this out but to my way of thinking it would be faster to render without steps. If you chose to render with a step of 5 frames, for instance, A:M would still have to calculate the frames inbetween if there were particles and probably for other aspects of the image. I don't know how much information is passed on from one frame to the next when calculating and rendering, so I can't be very accurate in my speculation, but that is the way that I see it. Render without steps!
One, or all, of the programmers would have to give the definitive answer to that one.

It was me who posted about rendering in steps.

What this allowed me to do was to quickly get the first frames of a long sequence rendered out so I could bring them into Sony Vegas and preview the animation without waiting for all frames to be rendered. This is just something that I do and works for me, but may not for everyone.

Al

Actually it would be:

PC 1 Render Frame 1 Step 3 (ie 1, 4, 7, 10 .....)
PC 2 Render Frame 2 Step 3 (ie 2, 5, 8, 11 .....)
PC 3 Render Frame 3 Step 3 (ie 3, 6, 9, 12 .....)

If you have 5 PCs then the step size = 5 etc

Cheers

Sorry. Yes three instances in your case. I just picked an arbitrary number.
For 3 instances it would be something like
:
PC1 - (1, 2, 3, 4, etc)
PC2 - (25, 26, 27, 28, etc)
PC3 - (49, 50, 51, 52, etc)