Rendering in manual strips

Released nicely in time for the results announcements of the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2009, this should remove any nagging doubt that, should your Apophysis flame be selected, you won't be able to render it to the required dimensions. A tutorial with scripts, this guides the artist through the stages necessary to produce huge poster-sized renders without overly taxing the PC. Anyone who's used the built-in method of rendering in strips either knows, or has an idea, that the render time is multiplied by the number of strips. Not so here: the total render time is the same as rendering in one would be, if suficient RAM were available to the system. The only stumbling block that remains is the memory handling of your chosen image software for assembling the final work...

Calling also upon the latest flam3 beta, I was able to render a 108 Mpx work in 3 strips in a mere two and a quarter hours. The assembly took less than 15 minutes (normally a matter of seconds) after two optimisations of the process and a re-write of the instructions!

Edit: I just learned a completely brilliant method of assembling the final image using IrfanView. If the final part was giving you doubts or headaches, please re-download - what took 15 minutes in the GIMP was about 10 seconds using the new method!