Rendering problems

When attempting to render static frames from some of the scenes the computers within the lab kept becoming non-responsive. To try and overcome this problem I used backburner to assign the job to several computers at once. However the problem encountered here was that the networked home drive kept going offline.
To use backburner one machine was set up as a manager and then others were connected as servers (including the manager machine itself) The jobs allocated and each server's progress was then viewed on the manager machine using the backburner monitor. This meant having to import 200-300 individual jpeg frames into adobe premiere pro and editing them to work as a whole by placing them on the timeline, selecting all, decreasing speed/duration to lowest amount possible and using ripple edit feature to apply this to all frames.

Other scenes were rendered as .avi files in stages to speed up the rendering time e.g 1 computer was set to render frames 0-50, another was set to render 51-100, yet another to do 101-50 and so on.