Crash on long renders solution

Question

hi,
i've asked some questions about crashes on long renders before, and i've seen that others have done the same. the answer seems to be to render more often in shorter segments as you're working, but sometimes that's not really possible, if the last step of your workflow involves a nest for example. for feature length work with some filters applied that often means 30 hours of rendering even on a fast machine. if you start that when you go home and return to work 30 hours later only to find all the work lost that's no fun (or if you're anal/stupid like me and ssh in before you go to bed and find out, not a good night's sleep).
so i thought i'd share my current solution, an apple script that interrupts the render every hour, saves the project, and restarts the render. works well, and if the crash results in an error dialog rather than a crash it can bring you through the whole render. if you get a real crash all that's lost is up to one hour of rendering since the last save. start the script, i just run it in script editor, switch to fcp with the timeline to be rendered open, then wait. have fun and good luck.
repeat
delay 30
tell application "System Events"
keystroke "r" using option down
end tell
delay 3600
tell application "System Events"
keystroke (key code 53) --escape
end tell
delay 30
tell application "System Events"
keystroke "s" using command down
end tell
end repeat
/mattias

Answer 1

btw don't keep any other software running in the background to which escape, opt-r and cmd-s mean anything that can break something, since i'm not checking to see if fcp is really running or even is in the foreground.