This paper focuses on the problem of rendering post production applications in a distributed environment. This is stressed by the need to limit the concessions that conventional in-house methods force operators to make to the quality of the end-products to get them on time and within budget. We introduce EROPPA, the HPCN project of the EC ESPRIT 4th Framework Program that carries out experiments on remote operations for the aforementioned applications. The paper elaborates on the details of a distributed system tailored for the requirements of post production and identifies various stakeholders requirements on the environment. A key contribution consists in proposing a reference architecture for distributed rendering that takes advantage of the parallel properties of the application to reduce the job turnaround time. Performance issues that stimulate the industrial sector to use the environment are finally discussed through a simplified evaluation framework. Results and directions are not only restricted to the post production area, but apply over a wide range of remote operations.