Long term solution to render crashes?
 

David, the 3.05 build definitely helped keep us from totally crashing out of PP CS3. It also helped us with renders...to a point.

Question: is there any hope for a better long term solution in the days to come?

The reason I ask, is we still have many errors, especially on large stills or any alpha layered material that's too complex or large. Then, the error messages start and we end up having to close PP and reopen to be able to render...if it even will. Sometimes it will not render, even after that. Not enough memory I guess.

So, is there any hope, or is this going to be a long term workaround until PP is finally 64 bit?

These faults occur in non-CineForm projects so these are Adobe errors. But we have ideas on how to reduce them further. In the meantime, reduce the size of your stills wherever you can, and make sure you let Adobe know so they fix it soon.

If you have large images and a lot of compositing, you may want to consider using After Effects since that is what it was designed to handle.

Actually we use AE quite a bit. Like David said, it's probably more of a prob with PP's mem hogging/handling. Especially when we have fairly large PSDs (anything larger than 2400 pixels usually means an error message or crash) which we're trying to use for panning or zooming in these HD projects, it's been pretty "ifie". We save lots and go out and reload PP jsut to be able to render anything big. A real pain.

Makes us long for a 64bit memory spaces/OS. Even though this series is made up of 35 min productions, we have 47 more to go, so we've got a thousand crashes ahead!

AE does handle many things better than PP for sure, but it's not the answer for regular editing (though I have a AE expert friend that would swear otherwise!). After experimenting, we've been doing all our AE stuff and importing into PP as numbered stills (PSD) as that's the only way we get fairly decent stability.