Unknown Error - Tips on saving to AVI - advice needed

[coolstuffiniowa]

So - I have been doing this for a while now and I am starting to get the hang of it....
I recently switched from PRE 4 to PRE 10.
Seemed like a good upgrade.
This past week I have been trying to compile my most recent video segments and get tem all to one central location for output on DVD.
There are about 20 segments ranging from 2.5 minutes to 10 minutes.
I started getting
UNKOWN ERROR COMPILING MOVIE error (or something to that effect)
I tried different segments....
and the same thing.
I made sure I rendered each segment....still the error.
Then - one of the segments works and saves in AVI format! Hooray.
Then the next one goes right back to the error.
After about a day of this - another one saves in AVI format.
There is absolutely no rhyme or reason why this would be saving these two - when in the past they had the error.
Very frustrating - and I have spent the last 2 days randomly trying to get the files to save to AVI.
Trying to save them to an alternate hard drive, trying to save them to a different external drive.

My C drive is almost full - should I clear it out and save some stuff on there?

Is this a RAM issue?

If so - why would this rear its ugly head now and not in the beginning when I have saved 20 minute segments?
Is there a way to save these files in another format that will be OK to output to DVD-R?
This DVD-R will then be duplicated and sent out to car afficianados around the country....
Any advice would be helpful!

[Steve Grisetti]

You do want to make sure your C drive has at least 20-50 gigs of free, clean, defragmented space -- so, in addition to having the necessary space, run Disk Cleanup and the Defragmenter on your drive. How much space to you have? And are you editing to your C drive or do you have a second drive for your media files?

As for your AVIs, can you confirm that we're talking about video captured by Premiere Elements from a miniDV camcorder over a FireWire connection? As you know, there are thousands of varieties of AVIs, and many can cause programs like Premiere Elements fits.

[coolstuffiniowa]

yes - I am capturing from Mini DV via Firewire.
I will go now to defragment the C drive.
Should I be doing the same thing to my external hard drive?