SERIOUSLY NEED HELP! Computer trying to display tons of jpegs when booting; causes computer to freeze.

Question

Please help me. This is a terrible situation. Last night, I was making a movie with iMovie and trying to find a way to export it that would be compatible with the item on which I am going to be displaying it (an Epson MovieMate via a USB Thumb Drive). I was SO frustrated that none of the formats iMovie could export in were compatible with the MovieMate, and also frustrated that the software I found to convert it from one of the iMovie formats to a format usable on MovieMate wouldn't convert the entire movie for free in its trial version, only half the movie.
Desperate for a solution, I was going through all the different ways iMovie could export, and I found it odd, but I found this jpeg one. Knowing that jpeg is a format for still photo files, it did strike me as odd, but I thought I would give it a try and see what would happen. After all, my "movie" is just one still photo with music playing for a half-hour. It said it would take over 40 minutes to create the "movie," so I went to bed.
To my shock, when I got up this morning, my computer was freaking out. It said that it had no more memory left or something like that, and prompted me to quit a bunch of open programs that weren't responding. I tried to do this, but it just wasn't handling things. Eventually the clock stopped progressing but I could still hear the processor working, so I just hoped it would work through the issue then snap out of it sort of, but instead, I eventually stopped hearing the processor sounds, and the cursor was also frozen. At this point I could see the whole computer was frozen, so I held down the power button for a few seconds to force the computer to turn off.
When I restarted it, it was trying to re-start all the applications I'd had open previously. After several minutes of trying to get it to quit all these things, it finally did, but nothing was displaying on my desktop yet. Normally there would be a HD disk image and a few folders. I had seen in a Finder window that there were tons of jpeg files supposedly on the desktop (where I had designated the file to save to), but I couldn't see how many. It never occurred to me that this is how iMovie would render things when I told it to save the project in jpeg format. I expected one jpeg file, not some tremendous and unknown amount.There may be hundreds or thousands if it created a jpeg for each "frame." Even if it created one jpeg file per second, that would be 1,800, and I suspect there's more than that. There could be several per second. Five per second would be 9,000 jpeg files. I hate to think but there may be a whole lot more than that even.
Finder continued to "think." I was never able to access it to do anything with it. There was a "stuck" Finder window which was displaying the Desktop folder, which is how I saw that there are multiple jpegs there. After a few minutes, I re-launched the Finder and was able to command it to not try to open a Finder window upon re-launch. After it re-launched, I could hear the processor working for a few more minutes. I think it obviously was working to display all the files on the desktop. The clock froze again, and the cursor movement was jumpy. Shortly, the cursor would not move anymore, and I could not hear the processor sounds anymore. The computer was frozen again. I held down the power button again to force it to shut down. When I re-started it, I logged into the Admin account (which I am using right now), which is the only way I think I can use my computer right now. I was also hoping I could access the files from the Admin account and just get them to display in a window so that I could delete them. I just want to delete them at this point. I wish I had never done this! I wish iMovie didn't even have that option or that iMovie would have explained to me what was going to happen if I were to proceed! I don't use my Admin account very often and wasn't really sure what it would be capable of doing. I can open a Finder window and access my Time Capsule, which contains something that looks like my hard drive image but when I double click on it, I get an error that says The following disk images could not be opened Macintosh.sparsebundle: Resource temporarily unavailable.
Anyway, please help! What do I do to get my computer back to normal??? I just want all those jpegs deleted and want to be able to log in and boot up like normal! This is a terrible situation as I use my computer for work and everything. I was needing to print some things for a presentation tonight. Please help me! Thank you!
Melanie
P.S. I just now got a Time Capsule backup message that came up and said Time Capsule could not complete its backup because Time Machine is unavailable! I am concerned this jpeg situation has gotten completely out of control and has gone beyond affecting my computer to also affecting my Time Machine!
(Also, additionally, assuming I can get my regular user account to boot up again at some point, if anybody happens to know how to get an iMovie file to save as .mpe, .mpg, .mpeg, .dat, or .vob, that information would be greatly appreciated.)

Answer 1

It worked! Thank you! I finally just finished about 20 minutes ago! It took over 26 hours to complete the process you described, but I stuck with it and it worked. I am glad I didn't give up or "forget it" as some might have suggested. That would have set me back until tomorrow!
Ultimately, it turned out there were 45,910 jpgs created. No wonder it took so many hours to render/display them all. It ended up being about 10 hours before it seemed they were all rendered but the process between them displaying and being able to start really deleting them took a few hours because partly I was asleep and also partly it took forever to do anything. Any action as simple as selecting and right-clicking to Get Info, or emptying the trash, would take 20-30 minutes, a couple times longer. The clock stopped many times for 20-30 minutes at a time, a few times over 30 minutes, before catching back up. My cursor never froze which is what really kept me going, although it was a spinning beach ball for most of the time. I was never so relieved to see my regular cursor as opposed to seeing a spinning beach ball as I was early this morning after about 10 hours!
Once I was able to open a Finder window and select all 45,900 files (I had already deleted 10 in the previous couple hours during experimenting of trying to figure out what would work best), then right-click and select to move all the files to the trash, the process of moving them to the trash took 4.5 hours. Then deleting them from the trash took a couple minutes. There were 21.4 GB!!! No wonder the whole process took 26 hours!
mende1, thank you so much!