More Animation Tutorials

I'm trying to get through this tutorial book Getting Started with Maya 7. The last part was an introduction to using inverse kinematics in animating a object's skeleton. Pretty cool! The model I used was already built, but I had to animate the thing myself. It's a crane that picks up a cargo box and drops it off after rotating around. I had a little trouble trying to get the rendered images into an .avi clip, but I finally found a way to do it using a video-editing program, Pinnacle Movie Studio 9 Plus. Not my all-time favourite video-editing program, but it works, which is the main thing. Just wish it would copy all my images in the same order, instead of mixing them up all the time......that means I have to do some manual arranging of images. Each image is a frame played at 30 fps - which means my six-second avi clip had 180 images to re-arrange. . . sheesh. Oh well, I'm lovin' it anyway.