I've just spent hours on a wild goose chase with the error message "Not enough system memory".

Running Power Director 8.00.3022 on XP SP3, I am trying to create a quick 10 minute clip. Just a video track, 4 PiP's on one track, 8 titles, a background music track and a narrative.

Nothing elaborate. What caught me right at the beginning was that after putting together the video track, I could not manipulate the PiP elements. As soon as I touched them, PowerDirector would freeze. No message, just "not responding". No mentioning in the XP event viewer either.

Playing the finished clip gave me a "Not enough system memory" error, which I ignored, as it played the next time. After restarting Power Director and the PC a few times I managed to finish the video editing.

Producing failed. But I did not know why. So I selected a low res format and noticed it crashed with a Not enough .... error.

I installed PowerDirector on my laptop, copied everything across and the very same, identical thing happened. Not enough system memory. I now put the video camera in front of the screen and tried producing various formats.

That's when I noticed that it always crashed at 6:02 with a Not enough .... error. I moved some scenes around and now it crashed at 6:11. So I deleted the video scene at 6:11 and it went through without a hitch.

So none of the crashes had anything to do with system resources but an mp4 file of 3 minutes and 11MB that PowerDirector simply did not like. The file came off YouTube, a standard file like I've used them endless times before.

So it seems that a file rendering crash has an inaccurate failure message attached.

Oh and after deleting the clip I was also able to edit the PiP parameters of the one that caused the freezing of PowerDirector. Strange.

But I hope this helps some others who are baffled by the behaviour of PowerDirector.