Render Farm / Batch Rendering

Hello there,

I thought I'd stick this out there in the hope that someone may have some advice.

I'm new to rendering Sketchup, I have ended up with a large and pretty complex model which I have to use for a rendered animation.  The resulting avi is quite large (800x 350px) and given the frame rate, passes etc that I need to achieve the right quality, it's turned into a beast of render - hundreds of hours in fact, which is no use.

I know there was talk of render farming, I wondered if that had got anywhere?  I could also split the animation and do batch rendering on separate scenes but the only other machines I have access to are Macs.  I'm no IT bod, but I'm pretty sure that the tutorial I saw on batch rendering won't work on a Mac.

Does anyone have any suggestions?  Has anyone used a third party to render large animations using IRender NXT?

Any help gratefully appreciated, I've ended up at a bit of a dead end here.

Cheers,

Robbie