Thanks Hanuman,

I'm probably making a habbit out of posting questions and working out the answers about an hour later by playing around but to be honest any information is invaluable and a lot of tips people help me out with do point me the right direction, i've managed to do a crude attempt at overlaying maya produced footage over DV, and it looks pretty seamless too, its not the footage i wanted but a test run on very simple objects over stock footage, I'm working on your suggestion of importing TIFF sequence's.

I've set maya to remder them as an interlaced image (i'm guessing that this makes it easier to produce a motion blur and overlay that effect) though its a lot to try and learn at once. thanks again...

heres another query though, what information do i need to plug into a camera's attributes to get it to represent my own camera? I have a DV cam and I have got all the information about it, i am simply fumbling about with this information and trying to understand how to interpret that so i can make my maya camera's emulate the real one, any tips?

thanks again

Andy