testing phase update

I attempted to run through some setup tests yesterday and hit a few snags in production. My plan was to film some small action figure or something in front of a green screen and make a quick-and-dirty 3D rendered background to throw it in. I needed to see how simply this could be done. The greenscreen keying is actually a lot easier than i remembered, but I ran into a major problem in Maya (the 3D modeling program I am using). For some reason, it will not render a scene as a movie clip; only as single, still images. I remember I used to be able to render .avi clips from it all the time (and even did so for a project last december...). But for some reason, the file would never complete properly. After some google-ing, I found out that apparently Maya is terrible at rendering .avi files, and the best course of action was to render the single frames and combine them in some other program like Premiere or After Effects. But even this is proving problematic, as I haven't yet found a time-effective way of putting the images into Premiere...

I want to have something to show for my progress by next Tuesday, and my work schedule is proving difficult with 40 hours this week. So worst case scenario, I will just continue with my testing using a still image until I can find a solution to my movie rendering problem.