And nearly all of it learned the hard way, fivecat. Few things beats the agony of rendering an 800-900 frame clip, with 20-40 minutes per frame average into 'an easy video format' only to have the thing bomb out at frame 798. Or worse, have one of your ancillary programs take a wild hair and decide you need to know about the newest version Right Now. I don't want to remember how many times I had render crashes in my newbie days until I found out the root of the issue was the bloody Quicktime updater yanking the processor away juuuuuuuust long enough for the animation to go crunch..... Blocking those updater ports sure does save one from that nightmare...