Are you turning on "full rendered" mode in the Animations? By default, all animation renders are in display mode. A good way to tell if you've got the right mode turned on is if the render is quick or slow (he he he)... As for compression... I have, for the most part been doing renders in "uncompressed" AVI, editing them in Premier and letting Premiere do the compression. I found this avoids a lot of problems, as long as you have the disk space. Lou