it is easier to render the animation as a movie, but I was reading a maya documentation and it gives alot of sugestions how to render your animations faster and rendering as indivisual frames is one. As far as rendering in the video editor, it really dosn't matter what you put inthe video as far as frames or entire videos. what makes it take so long is the special effects you put over the video, how long the video is and the compression that you use. I rember having virtualdub along time ago to seperate a video sequence into single frames, but i really didn't like it back then. it seemed buggy, but i'll try it.