PE 11 hangs/crashes/unsuccessful during rendering process..

Question

After working for two weeks on my project and ready to do the final edits, PE 11 is no longer able to render my project.  (this has therfore 'rendered' me unable to finish what I have just spent so much time on. )  It appears to begin to render the clip, but hangs after it reaches (for example) frame 47 out of 423 frames.  It does not move on from 47...no error message, just sits there frozen until I cancel to render process (which is obviously not proceeding)  PE 11 worked like a champ until the last 15 minutes of production, then leaves my project dead in the water.  Terribly frustrating...Can anyone offer advice?..Thanks, John

Answer 1

I had a computer tech come in and solve this issue.  Several adobe techs attempted to remedy this situation, but all had failed after several hours.  I asked my computer tech to give me a brief explanation of how he remedied the problem and this is what he wrote..
'To fix the rendering issue we tried a bunch of things but here is what I think eventually worked. The application had a pile of damaged renders for some reason. These were in the preview folder. One thing I noticed the application will do is 'fail' silently when you are rendering a portion of the video that was already rendered and has a file in the preview folder. I imagine this is an efficiency thing in order to save cycles because if a preview already exists, you don't need to remake it.
However I am not sure what the application uses to determine if the time line for a given section to be rendered is 'dirty' or needs to be re-rendered for preview. From what I can tell if it has any logic to tell if a section is 'dirty', that logic was not working.
We ended up deleting all of the damaged renders and re-associating the missing links in the application to some resources. I think the combination of these two things may have corrected the problem. Once the damaged renders were gone, the logic that was telling the application a preview did not need to be made was bypassed and the render was completed.
As to why the render may have failed in the first place: It could have been the missing file associations. That could easily cause a silent failure because it would cause a read error while it was trying to render. I like to think they made an application that would be robust enough to tell you one of the files you are using in your time line has a resource location issue, but that does not seem to be the case.
So to anyone who is having the same problem as you were having, I would tell them to fix any missing file associations in the media resources and then delete all the previous renders that they are not going to keep. After that try rendering again and see what happens. One thing also did was to change the location of the preview output as well. The first time we got it to render was after we did this. I then changed it back and it failed again until we cleared the files.
I hope that helps someone in the forums you were asking around in.'