Light cones (any visible light effects) do not play well with any of the g-buffers in the render settings. All of them should be off (un-checked) except pixel color. Another thing that can kill a movie render are problems with the compression codecs. Some codecs need specific frame sizes to work (divided evenly by 4 - both height & width) Try rendering to avi with no compression. A better way to do any movie render in Carrara is render to sequenced frames with any of the lossless compression options. Putting the movie together outside of C gives you a whole world of other options and if Carrara should crash in the middle of a render it is very easy to pick up with the last frame rendered instead of starting the whole thing over. Carrara 2.1 adds alot of value and does make the program much easier to live with. mdc my 2 cents worth of (non-spell-ckecked) comments