If you are using AO, did you set it up to "Evaluate Transparency"?

I think the problem comes from the Alpha Channel of the tree leaves not being processed correctly by AO. If the "Evaluate Transparency" does not work you will probably are not going to be able to use AO for this.
1. ray depth 12, refl. depth 3, shadow depth 10. 2. "Render Failed! Preview.mov might still be in use by the Movie Player" 3. The scene is a city scape and a camera flight into one building.

1.a Ray Depths are way too high, try them at 2: 1: 1 as a test to see if it will render your full scene. If it does render, gradually increase them in stages up to 6: 3: 6 or whatever is required by the scene. Reflections etc. Only go as high as you need to get the quality you need.

jpg's the bane of renders !! Jpgs are a bad choice for large textures, they fool you into thinking that the texture is small in size but the computer has to continually decompress each texture before render. I have had a lot of issues with relatively small jpgs ie. only 7 Mb but the image is 16000 K x 8000 k ( roughly) When i open them in irfanview i see that though the jpeg is around 7 MB on disk, the actual size is around 400 MB, this means that C4D is really thrasing memory to decompress these images The secret is to convert them to say TGA or Tiff, check what the color setting is and lower it if needed. For instance i was having real problems rendering a mars shot with these large textures, they were showing as 24bpp, but was able to solve the issue by saving the jpegs as tga and then lowering the color depth, i was able to half my ram usage and get the file sizes down by

about a quater ( OK they are around 100 MB as opposed to 7 Mb but this is the real size and is not forced to decompress at render time)

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In many procedural shaders you will find a setting mysteriously called "Delta", it's a diminutive setting easily overlooked, but this is most frequently the key to getting crisp and good looking bumpmaps. How to use "Delta", and how it works. To improve the quality or sharpness of your bumpmap simply lower the Delta value, very low values will result in the apparent height of the bump map lessening so you will have to compensate by increasing the bump map strength (don't forget that as with many sliders in C4D the bump strength value can be set higher or lower than the actual extents of the slider), but they will also result in the bump looking crisper and better defined! Don't set it too small though because the smaller the Delta the more likely you are to get "Flicker" and "Strobing" surfaces without setting up super high AA values. So what is it going? Delta ias actually controlling the distance between the samples used to create the bump maps surface normal (the direciton teh surface apparently faces), the closer togehter they are the sharper the result the further apart the softer and less defined. To get technical typically three samples of shader brightness are used from three points close to each other and the surface normal is taken by the cross product of these values multiplied by the strength setting. If they're too far apart then what happens is that finer detail will be missed in the gap between the actual samples. To go along with this, when using Bitmap's as shaders you may frequently want to lower the MIP settings into negative in the bump channel, or for stills even turn off the MIP altogether and choose something else such as Circle sampling in order to get the crispest possible result.

++++++++++ As an addition to this here's the steps involved in order to keep Cinema set up with reasonably optimal settings every time: To set up your render settings and scene: 1) File->New... 2) Render->Render Settings a. General->Name (give any name you want for this preset). b. Save->Depth set to 32 Bit/Channel c. Antialiasing->Filter set to Sinc d. Effects->Post Effect->Color Correction, set Gamma to 1.8/2.2 e. Effects->Post Effect->Sharpen Filter, set Strength to 10% f. Options->Ray Depth, reduce to 6, Shadow Depth reduce to 6 (speed increase). +++++++ The "Ambient Illumination" mode of C4D's lights. This is a much ignored option, and rightly so 9 times out of 10, the original purpose of ambient illumination was to simulate global illumination before 3D apps had global illumination. Indeed today you can in many situations get away with using ambient illumination instead of GI for the more simplistic forms of Arch Viz (in fact many Arch Viz renders already look like they're only using ambient illumination anyway so there's no point in bothering with GI itself in those cases as ambient illumination will render many thousands of times faster). So what can we use it for? Well, there's a few things. Firstly in conjunction with global illumination itself. GI tends to slow down in extremes where there is super bright or super dark areas, adding a very dark ambient illumination light (with no specular on) can allow you to reduce the number of bounces of your GI whilst still getting a good lighting level and speeding up the GI calculation itself on top of that (and helping smooth out the GI result thus allowing you to frequently reduce the samples used too). So it's useful as a GI helper. Well what about replacing GI? Can it still be used for this? The answer

is that in some situations, yes it can. For instance a very popular look still is the clay render and "physical sky", you can emulate this look very much faster than with actual GI by doing the following: 1) Make an ambient gray-blue light, set it to be quite dark. 2) Create a light for your sun, give it a slightly orange/yellow tint, and a hard or area shadow, possibly turn the lights brightness above 100% depending on the light location (time of day). 3) From the render settings turn on "Ambient Occlusion" 4) Render Your object should now have a nice very smooth and relatively quick "physical sky" look. With careful tweaking of the light colors you should be able to approximate most daylight lighting conditions without having to expend precious CPU cycles on full on GI. So what else is there that this little feature can do? SSS is what else... ok admittedly it's very choppy and useless in 99% of cases, however here's how to create an ultra simple and ultra fast SSS effect. Create an ambient omni light, turn on soft shadows, and now just play around with the shadow bias in order to control the depth of the poor mans SSS effect (and use the Scene settings to include/exclude objects from this effect). ++++++++++ pro reflection explanation http://www.the123d.com/tutorial/general4/reflections2-1.shtml