Cristian,

Have you experimented with Xserve RAIDs at all? I have been able to get very good results with one. I can get quite a lot done with one serving 8 Catalyst servers doing SD. I'm sure if you were to use serve less catalysts off of one, and used the correct codecs this might be possible to do (of course there still lies the limitation of the color modes). An xserve RAID serving a catalyst built around a Quad G5 should have the horsepower to pull something like this off. I have not tried it just yet, but if you could get one layer to work using the animation codec, which supports Alpha channels, and one using either DVntsc (if they are giving you a Beta meant for broadcast anyways you wont be losing anthingin your colorspace) or perhaps PhotoJpeg you might be able to do this. I know these are more expensive pieces of gear, but it is still probably cheaper than Profile, while being a little more versatile.

What do you think Richard?

Jason