Rendering was done with MAX's built-in scanline renderer using image motion blur on every object. In shots that show the Christmas tree lights, I used a video post glow filter to animate them blinking.

The rendering process took about 187 hours from start to finish at NTSC resolution on my dual Pentium III-600MHz computer with 256MB ram. Having dual CPU's helped as it almost doubled the rendering speed. Ram requirements never exceeded 200MB at TV resolution. However, if I were to render Ornaments for film, I'd need at least 512MB to prevent exessive swapping to disk.

For final output, I rendered to 720x389 uncompressed Targa files at 24 frames per second. That's a 1.66 aspect ratio image squashed vertically by 10% for NTSC.