Originally posted by mtmckinley Just to echo what's been said, yeah, rendering straight to an AVI doesn't result in good quality usually, and even if it does, if for whatever reason your computer crashes or something, you can't just start rendering the avi from where you left off. It's much safer to render an image sequence. You can start and stop it whenever and then compile it all together to make a good quality avi. I installed the XviD encoder (and MANY others). I can render to .avi and choose to compress using XviD, but it doesn't work :headbang: If you read the help files carefully you will note that only one compressed format is supported, along with uncompressed format. So if you render to AVI then choose uncompressed (it works fine in Maya 2008 :p ). Here is an AVI that was reprocessed (super compressed) so I could upload it here without beating up the server: https://forum.simplymaya.com/showthre...265#post259265 The problem that _I_ have with using the 'numbered' files is that you end up with a directory full of many files -- I prefer just one AVI. You can always delete all those files once you have made your AVI. I agree with the 'crashing comments' -- why does Maya crash every few hours (or sooner), for what it costs?