I have some tricks, but I'm not sure if they actually fix any problems, they just worked for me when something else didn't. I do all animation output to cinepak codec, with quality set to 100% set at keyframe every 15 frames; I started doing this with P4P, because I would apparently randomly get the grey screen when using other codecs, or corrupt video in general. this apparently fixes the problem I was having, but it may have just been my machine. you get some compression, and very little loss. If its a BIG/long animation, do a test render; if you render out your animation at 80x80 or 160x160, even with everything turned on but shadows, it'll not take very long, and save you the agony of realizing you just wasted hours of platform time. If you are doing work with P4P, or P5 without the firefly render engine (not using dynamics or cell shaders? the P4 renderer will be nearly equal), consider getting a copy of Vue D'esprit 4 with Mover 4; if you can find it for sale, it'll probably be cheap and will allow you to spread your render out over networked machines. In P5, I have no problem with p4 engine renders, but the only way I can get firefly renders to create anything is if I output as uncompressed format. Vue 5 and mover 5 allegedly work with P5 dynamics, but I can't afford a copy at the moment, so I can't really say. Hmm. I wandered from the question.