I have a couple new questions.

As I said I am pretty green at animating stuff. I created a 100 frame animation just to test things out. I tried to select .avi as the output format and the animation was all pixelated and was pretty terrible looking.

So I made another render, but this time I selected individual .iff files. I then looked at the animation using fcheck and it looked much better. But now I don't know how to create an avi file from the individual frames?

In fcheck there is an option to "save animation" but all the formats it lists are for single images ie tiff, jpeg, bmp, etc. I cannot see anything that would be a video format. In fact there is also an option to save a single frame and it has exactly the same file formats. It is like there is a bug in fcheck and "save animation" just brings up the same "save image" dialog box.

So I can look at an animation within fcheck of the 100 individual .iff files but I don't know how to convert them into any kind of video file format like .avi.