Realdeal, are you rendering directly to codec? I still don't understand why the posters here doing heavy animation don't render out to individual files. 1) you see each frame render on your screen, so you KNOW if you are getting the deadly gray screen. 2) You can also see if something is not right part way into the mass render. 3) You can abort any time, then start again from where you left off. 4) Since your output is in the very highest format, uncompressed tif for each frame, you have total control over then post-processing and compressing. 5) you can toss the individual frames at the end if disk space is an issue. ::::: Opera :::::