Hello All, i have given a name to my rendering pain and it is "Sequenced Images". Every time i try to render an animation in carrara as the above mention pain, i get file not found errors. Sometimes i even get a message stating that Virex has quit because the virex control panel could not be found. This happens no matter what image format i choose. The only reason I attempt to render as images is that carrara doesn't seem to support rendering QuickTime animations with alpha channels. So for now I must render my objects as Quicktimes with contrasting solid backgrounds and then key out the backgrounds in Adobe After Effects. No doubt Adobe will eventually address this issue. c9

Not exactly sure what you'r trying to do but I did a quick test on my MAC. Did a simple little animation with a shere which had Marks "brushed metal" shader applied. Rndered animation and then "saved as" sequntial picts, used "none" in the quicktime plug-in compression settigs option. Seemed to work OK. Perhaps you could use MoviePlayer 2.5 to extract the video channel from your movieand resave from there as another format (make sure you have latest QT extensions but unless you have QTPro you need to use Movie Player 2.3). Also, Apple is offering a free download of iMovie to G4 & PowerBook owners (it also works on G3s). Not sure what that may offer though, havn't had the time to check it out.

Thanks for the suggestions Willf. I've created an animated ribbon blowing in wind and this is what i'm attempting to render. I did a straight rectangle in the spline modeler and used the wave modifier to do the animation. Now that you mention it, i did have success in rendering a sphere as sequential photoshop 2.5 w mask G-buffer turned on, and it composited just fine in After Effects. I dont know why it is not working with the ribbon though. I will try it with different objects.