3 attempts to export a movie from iMovie - pulling my hair out

I have a large project in Imovie 11, mixture of video clips and photographs. I have tried 3 times to export to HD. This takes 11 hours to run  each time so you can imagine how frustrated I am!!!!  I am using the menu option SHARE, EXPORT MOVIE, and choosing HD. Like I said it takes 11 hours then I get error -49 cannot prepare movie, I have had this 3 times now so frustrated, please can anyone help me, what am I doing wrong?
I read somewhere on this forum about running analyze video, but when I choose this the options are greyed out so I cannot choose any. Help before I jump out the window, thank you.
Running on a MacBook Pro, Mountain Lion and 175GB free space on disk.

geoffreyfrombasingstoke wrote:
I have a large project in Imovie 11, mixture of video clips and photographs. I have tried 3 times to export to HD. This takes 11 hours to run  each time so you can imagine how frustrated I am!!!!  I am using the menu option SHARE, EXPORT MOVIE, and choosing HD. Like I said it takes 11 hours then I get error -49 cannot prepare movie, I have had this 3 times now so frustrated, please can anyone help me, what am I doing wrong?
I read somewhere on this forum about running analyze video, but when I choose this the options are greyed out so I cannot choose any. Help before I jump out the window, thank you.
Running on a MacBook Pro, Mountain Lion and 175GB free space on disk.
Hi Geoffrey,
Right-click (or Control-click) on one of the video clips in the project timeline. From the pop-up menu select Reveal in Finder. Now open the clip with QuickTime and select from the menu "Window > Show Movie Inspector". In the Inspector, tell us what is shown for Format and FPS (frames per second).
It's possible that you are using an unusual video format (codec) that iMovie is having trouble with. Another possibility is that one or more of your photos is corrupted.
One thing to try is to select from iMovie's menu "File > Optimize Video" (you mentioned Analyze Video, but that is quite different to Optimizing).
Another suggestion is to turn off Time Machine when exporting, if you have that running.
I may be back with other suggestions (but dish washing and wife's cuppa tea is beckoning)!
John

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