Hi Patsy
The short answer is "Yes," so you do want to avoid unnecessarily producing clips - but there's an easy way to do that
SVRT is your friend here, and when you produce each range, be sure to use the same profile that you want to produce your finished video to. Assuming you can get through the shorter clips without a crash (which may
not be related to you project's length, see below), then you can line them all up on the timeline and use SVRT to essentially combine them all without re-producing each of them.
There are tutorials and posts here if you're not familiar with SVRT, and the best news is that it's reeeaaallly fast!
The thing I'm most concerned about is the crash, which shouldn't happen no matter how big a project you have.
Some things to look at are whether you have the latest version of PD (see the v3408 patch post at the top of the PD16 forum), and also make sure your video drivers are up to date. I don't know anything about your computer, but if you have an nVidia GPU, you'll want to use this driver:
https://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/138338
Please post back if you have any questions!
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