Also, can you please tell me what media player you are using, and what the given error is?

In theory it should and would make sense for it to take the same amount of time to render a frame for image sequence and video file, I havent really checked myself.

Make sure your not switching in and out of windows while its rendering, this normally results in blue and red frames, and sometimes audio distortion... Rendering the video in an image sequence in PNG format is the best way to go personally for me, it gives me all the frames without a huge sized video,and without the unpredictability of damage to the video file, such as what happend with you. There are lots of programs out there to combine the frames and the audio files into your video, I use Adobe After Effects.

For me oddly its the other way around, after the latest big change to the UI, im getting more performance overall...

Well im assuming you always check your render settings before render right :/? Like the DOF passes, even the change in lighting will effect your render most of the time, all that stuff

Uhhhhh, its very normal waiting that long........SFM needs to render everything >.>

I would suggest that you make the map in Hammer SDK, to avoid any map issues :/, thats just what I would do.

Nicely done!

This might sound dumb but I always normally downloaded the resources from http://www.garrysmod.org/downloads/, so basicly you install the models/materials just like you would for any Source engine game, but when it comes to extracting them the way in that link, never tried it :/

Really O_o, the update fixed mine....