Compositing software should have no influence on your 3d app, since in a compositor you are dealing with already rendered material. (Though Mirage does have good integration with Lightwave (Including a 3d paint plugin) Not sure what you mean about "Ripping out to DVD" Mirage is perfectly capable of producing content for DVDs (Indie animator Terrence walker has put out 2 DVDs with the progenetor software of Mirage which was sold by Newtek under the name Aura) If you mean MPEG 2 compression, I HIGHLY reccomend you get a dedicated encoder. I use TMPGEnc.