In my experience I have more trouble when the project becomes more complicated or PD had to load too many videos to the library. If possible you may want to try to split up your video into manageable pieces.

Load the videos and images which take you through the first 15 minutes and render that to the file format that you like. Don't worry if the background music is not set correctly at this point. Just get the video in order and edited as you want. Produce a file of this section in your desired format. Then you can repeat this for the rest of the video. Once all of this is completed you can loaded each individual segment to the timeline and perform any minor adjustments, add music, titles, etc. and produce that in your target format.

Make sure you save each segment using the "save as" method along the way. Q9300 2.5 GHz
4 GB Ram
Nvidia 9800 GT

James, You are da man. I could not have said it more succinctly.

ps: if I have applied a lot of fancy edits to a segment,
I sometimes have to isolate out that segment and place it into a "new" project and then edit and produce it separately.
Some can be as small as a few seconds long.
It helps me to control the whole project better when I split it into smaller, managable pieces.
Less frustrating 4 me, based on my level of intelligence, to edit smaller projects.
Then produce those and then collate them together.
The toughest thing 4 me is labeling the pieces in a manor that I will be able to put them back together in the proper order for the final production. The best thing about PD is the people in the Forums !!!
Win-7 Ultimate, ASUS Rampage III Extreme, Intel Core i7-980X, 12-GBs DDR3, Intel X25-M 160GB SDD, Asus nVidia GeForce GTX580 (1), Dell U3011 Monitor, Canon HF100 and HF-S21

Thanks a lot guys!
This workaround came into my mind
I do wonder if rendering twice will degrade the quality?
But normally PD is intelligent and does not render a video if the quality is same like output, I guess...

Stephan, Looking at your dxdiag.txt file I see you have Windows 7 64bit with only 4 GB of ram. That is like having only 2 GB of memory for a 32 bit system.

I would recommend that you increase your Memory to at least 8 GB. I know that PD8 is a 32 bit application, but your OS is 64 Bit and needs the Ram.

Another thing that helps PD8 is to increase the virtual memory. 8 GB or more would not hurt. You have plenty of space on you hard drive. Carl312: Windows 10 64-bit 8 GB RAM,AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz,ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB,240GB SSD,two 1TB HDs.

Quote: Stephan, Looking at your dxdiag.txt file I see you have Windows 7 64bit with only 4 GB of ram. That is like having only 2 GB of memory for a 32 bit system.

I would recommend that you increase your Memory to at least 8 GB. I know that PD8 is a 32 bit application, but your OS is 64 Bit and needs the Ram.

Another thing that helps PD8 is to increase the virtual memory. 8 GB or more would not hurt. You have plenty of space on you hard drive.

More memory won't hurt, but it may not help if he is primarily running PD8 and not much other stuff at the same time. The GT 320 video card is on the low side of processing power for a video editing application and I would upgrade that at first opportunity to something more powerful.

Some other things he can try:
Close unnecessary applications
Defragment the hard drives.
Keep source media on one drive and produce the video to another physical drive (improves performance)
Configure virus scanner to exclude PD-related input and output folders which can interfere with performance
Save up money to get a better video card

Win8 64-bit Pro Retail
Intel i7-4770
16GB DDR3 1600 8-8-8-24
MSI Z87-G45 Motherboard
ASUS GTX 660 Direct CU II OC 2GB GPU
1 TB RAID 1 (mirrored) Drive Array
Several scratch drives for video, TMP, pagefile.

Thanks all for these hints

It is a brand new system, so the enclosure is sealed for warranty.
I was a bit afraid of this 64bit system, and indeed the memory being 64bit wide needs at least 4G.
Also the video card, despite being Cudo, does not work with PD8. Turning hardware acceleration ON, halts the system.

For the moment I try to work very slow and step by step.
This also helps!

Also the video card, despite being Cudo, does not work with PD8. Turning hardware acceleration ON, halts the system.

Do you have the latest video card drivers installed (get them at the Nvidia.com website) as well as the CUDA software required to use hardware acceleration with PD8? Win8 64-bit Pro Retail
Intel i7-4770
16GB DDR3 1600 8-8-8-24
MSI Z87-G45 Motherboard
ASUS GTX 660 Direct CU II OC 2GB GPU
1 TB RAID 1 (mirrored) Drive Array
Several scratch drives for video, TMP, pagefile.

Hmm, Cuda software
Is this not integrated into PD8?

Older NVidia drivers required a separate download of CUDA. They may be integrated now, just have to enable the hardware encoding in PD Win8 64-bit Pro Retail
Intel i7-4770
16GB DDR3 1600 8-8-8-24
MSI Z87-G45 Motherboard
ASUS GTX 660 Direct CU II OC 2GB GPU
1 TB RAID 1 (mirrored) Drive Array
Several scratch drives for video, TMP, pagefile.

Last night I worked for a few hours on my project, it never stopped once!

I think the problem was the virus scanner
So putting the Cyberlink folders and output folders in the excluded scanning list did the trick!
I also disabled the auto save option, this can help that PD is not saving while you are editing (I think).

Thanks a lot

Quote: Last night I worked for a few hours on my project, it never stopped once!

I think the problem was the virus scanner
So putting the Cyberlink folders and output folders in the excluded scanning list did the trick!
I also disabled the auto save option, this can help that PD is not saving while you are editing (I think).

Thanks a lot

Great news! Yes, the virus scanner can create a lot of havoc with very large files used when editing video. Win8 64-bit Pro Retail
Intel i7-4770
16GB DDR3 1600 8-8-8-24
MSI Z87-G45 Motherboard
ASUS GTX 660 Direct CU II OC 2GB GPU
1 TB RAID 1 (mirrored) Drive Array
Several scratch drives for video, TMP, pagefile.

It is NOT a good idea to disable the auto save.

If something happens to your project file, the only way to recover is from the project backup folder. Carl312: Windows 10 64-bit 8 GB RAM,AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz,ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB,240GB SSD,two 1TB HDs.

Indeed Carl,

That is why I manually save each 15 min using a different name...

That is good to do. But the automatic save would do it for you without fail.

Automatic save puts a time stamp on the filename. You can set the auto save to a different time interval if you wish. Carl312: Windows 10 64-bit 8 GB RAM,AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz,ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB,240GB SSD,two 1TB HDs.