The long encode times are why I went with an uncompressed version of the films first, THEN encoded that. Too many little things that were occassionally going wrong or I'd forget when trying to do the whole thing in one go. If you've got the space, I'd highly recommend doing it this way, as it also lets you play around with the MPEG encode without having to re-render the script. It ALSO would allow someone to render a nice XVID or h264 of the films as well...damn, I wish now I'd saved my uncompressed files...