LBT, as a newbie, I must heavily underscore Miss Nancy's "save out to tiff" comment. That will save you plenty o' frustration in the future. Many things can go wrong with the program or computer or you might just get bored from waiting. Saving to an image will at least leave you with something to look at and consider whether its worth another take, as is. On the subject of "takes". Rendering to an image you can also set it to render out every 5th frame. This is great for getting an idea how the rendered sequence will look before waiting the three days for the whole thing to render on 1's. Looking at the preview animated can be good enough for evaluating body positions or camera animation but until you see rendered frames you might not realize that your character has been covered in shadow for the last two seconds of the animation. Or some other bad thing that wouldn't catch your attention when testing the first frame. Oh, and my personal favorite: Rendering to image makes it easy to go into Photoshop (or your favorite paint program) and correct minor flaws or add effects etc. good luck