CS4: PProHeadless crash in TitleCharacterFactory.dll - unable to render

Question

Hey, guys.
I've spent the better part of the morning searching the forum and it appears that pproheadless crashes are not uncommon. That said, I've not seen anything in discussions yet that leads to a solution, but I may have missed something. So, here's the story. In short, AME crashes about a third of the way through a rendering job on a project reporting that pproheadless has stopped working and pointing a finger at the Titler dll with an access violation (sounds like somebody blew a C++ pointer). Here's the geek stuff on the crash from the event log:
Faulting application name: PProHeadless.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x4b04af19
Faulting module name: TitleCharacterFactory.dll, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x4b04a39b
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x000618fd
Faulting process id: 0xa24
Faulting application start time: 0x01cb2fe6159fb67a
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Premiere Pro CS4\PProHeadless.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Premiere Pro CS4\TitleCharacterFactory.dll
Report Id: 886e72e8-9bda-11df-8fb9-b8ac6f8200f4
This is a new box with decent horsepower, new install of Windows 7 / CS4. For general specs, see my "Faster Ponies" post: http://forums.adobe.com/message/2974680#2974680.
What I've gleaned from my reading this morning is that the Titler is a bit fragile, and in fact I had numerous instances yesterday in Premiere where I'd be in the titler and the app would crash and vanish. Corrupt fonts were one thing mentioned, but I'm using titles from a Premiere template, Government 1. The project source material is AVCHD, so I'm using the HD versions.
The video is about 9 minutes long. I've just run a test where I render with the titles video track set to not visible. Renders fine. Then I rendered with only the titles track visible. Also renders okay. So, it appears that AME crashes only when trying to render the titles in combination with the other material.
In a previous lifetime on this video, I had converted my AVCHD source material to SD and used it in an SD project. Same title sequences using the same Government 1 template, but no crashes.
So, to summarize: the Titler dll (TitleCharacterFactory.dll) is causing an access violation in PProHeadless.exe when attempting to render a project combining footage and titles, but succeeds when rendering either exclusively. The Titler also causes occasional spontaneous Premiere crashes. Have run the updater for all Adobe products, video card, etc., rebooted the machine numerous times, burned incense, sacrificed chickens and uttered the sacred words of geek frustration multiple times.
I know pproheadless crashes have been done to death, but if anyone has any insights on why the Titler is so flaky and what possible fixes I might explore, I'd be most grateful.
Thanks,
Chris

Answer 1

Hey, Rod.
Thanks very much for taking the time. I waded through so many posts I somehow missed that one. I gave it a try this morning, but unfortunately received the same crash at the same roughly 40% point.
I normally have Preview turned off, but turned it on to get a visual of where in the project it's dying. I'd expected it to be at a place lining up with where one of the titles occur, since it's the titler dll that's faulting. Surprisingly, there are no titles within several seconds in either direction. And yet, if I turn off the titles (they're on a Video track of their own) it renders fine, and if I turn everything else off and render just the titles, it's fine. Only the two in combination kill the render.
Now that I have a decent machine I've really been enjoying working with CS4, but the titler thing is a bit disconcerting. Failing on the rendering of the final output means nothing else matters much. My Plan B is to render all output except titles and then bring it all into After Effects to finish the project. While AE is more fun & cool to play with, I mourn the loss of the titler in PPro since sometimes all I need is simple - and quick - titling, an ability that I can no longer trust unless I can find the source of this problem and fix it.
BTW, is it considered a "normal" workflow to just use Premiere for the slice & dice editing and then render the entire video to finish up in AE? I know AE is an FX program, but wonder if it's also used by folks to generate final output of a movie.
On your other note, while I toook Harm's advice on multiple hard drives, etc. I neglected to move the page file, which I'll be doing this afternoon. Doubt it will have any influence on this paticular problem, but I'll take all the speed increases I can get!
Thanks again for digging around on this, man. I do appreciate it.
Chris