well I hardly ever get the rendering stages of my stuff so thats why I probably didnt think of that :) Eovia has said that the new C2 render will be awesome, so I am assuming that the AA problem is taken care of. As for alpha mattes I would say dont give up yet. Look around in this forum for how to do it. The normal intuitive way is to put the mask in the transparency channel but that is incorrect...you need to put it in a blender channel...Anotine & a few others have screen captures showing the process...if you do it the way the engineer's developed it, then it works great. If you do it the way a normal sane person would, you get some weirdo edge.