It's amazing what you can find if you actually crack open the manual! (But it was at home, I was not, so you get the idea....) I had tried exactly what was described by your very helpful replies above. Here's what I missed: Greg's step 5 says, "select sequence." Problem was, until late last night, I'd never seen the "sequence" tick box. But, once I've hilighted a file that can support a sequence, it suddenly un-shades itself and becomes an option. Thanks so much to everyone! I have it now! Neb -- cool workaround. I never would have thought to go by way of Quicktime. I'm on a PC, so it's not my first line of thought. And, by the way, RDS does generate a great alpha channel. (Unless you're using the motion blur within RDS -- then it gets funky.) For anyone's info, it seems to work best using premultiplied with black. Brent -- I'm on supervisor number 10 in 3 years, now, and they're about to move me to another division. I'm just glad that they haven't decided to get rid of my position entirely! (Besides, this is my personal copy of AE 3.1; I can't afford to upgrade just now -- just spent my wad on a new computer....) And I remember working with photoshop before it had LAYERS! (2.0, I think is the version I started on....) Ack! Thanks, again, to everyone for coming to my rescue! Dex