Crashing on export to H.264

Question

I am just getting my feet wet with Motion and have suddenly started experiencing an export issue.
I am putting together some 1 and 2 second motion theme graphics for a trade show. Nothing at all fancy. Just a few basic moves using mostly imported layers of a Photoshop file.
The first few exported fine. I used H.264 compression so I could email the files to people. However the last two have crashed Motion on export. There is motion on four separate elements but only a rotate here and a fade-in there. Nothing crazy. The weird thing is that I CAN export to Apple's 4444 without crashing. I end up with a file over 100 megs but I do have a file. It gets ftp'ed instead of email but at least people can see it.
But really, why do you suppose this is happening? As you can see in my profile, I have a brand new iMac quad i7. It's not like I'm running a piece of junk here. I see no reason that it couldn't handle something so simple.
BTW I just went back to one of the "simpler" animations that DID get exported to H.264 and once again it DID export without a hitch.

Answer 1

well it might not fix your problem, but there are a couple of things to try. If you can export a prorez 444, then import that into compressor and export an h264. You can also try importing the motion project into fcp, drop it on a timeline and Send to compressor form there. I sometimes seem to get different results this way. The other thing to try is to copy the h264 preset you're using in compressor and to fiddle with the settings. it might be a corrupted settings file somewhere.
You might as well throw the preferences for motion and compressor away. lastly you might try turning layers off in your motion project, see if you can narrow it down to a specific item. It could be a corrupted file, or perhaps some layer becoming too big for your graphics card. You could try turning on fixed resolution for any suspect layers.
hth
adam