Ken Burns Redux & Motion

So this week I knew I was going to be working with a bunch of stills. I go to lafcpug.org because I want to brush up on my key framing in FCP and, voila, right on the front page the Ken Burns Redux tutorial, great job guys!

It worked out great for the first two days. Yesterday, I roundtripped my final segment to Motion, saved and went back to FCP. Hit Apl-R to render and poof, FCP gone. My mac says my OS has had some problems and do I want to re-open FCP or cancel out. I re-open and the project I was working on opened but the version from the night before, not five minutes before. I go to the Autosave vault and open the most recent project file, finish my work and move on. At the end of the day I back-up the orginal project file and the auto saved version on another networked computer drive, copy the auto-saved version into my projects folder on my local hard drive, re-name it and continue working.

This morning the same thing happened but I'd saved my project right before I started my render. When I re-opened FCP after the crash and tried to render, it said it had problems rendering one of my Motion projects so I erased that project, laid in the stills again and round-tripped them under a different file name. Back in FCP when I tried to render my sequence it said it was having problems with the "duration" of this project and it can't connect to some of the elements. Long story short, I ended up cutting the segment from my sequence and finishing the edit.

First question, anyone else had this problem round-tripping to Motion?

Second, did I do the right thing regarding my project files? Anyone think it's a project problem or is it just Motion?

Third, are there any settings I can tweek in FCP that will make it run better with Motion or vice-versa? Or any tips on running this workflow, like maybe rendering each project separately or in Motion before returning to FCP (do you even render in Motion??)

Finally, is there anything I can do diagnostically to figure out what went wrong and prevent it in the future?

Thanks for bearing with me.
Andre

MacOSX 10.4.11
FCP 6.0.3
2x3Ghz Dual-Core Intel 4GB
250GB Internal HD 90GB free
750GB x2 Media Drives each with a little under 200GB free

Andre-

I have had little luck with round tripping between Motion and FC. What I usually do is.

1) save my project
2) send to Motion
3) save the resulting motion project
4) Undo in Final cut till I have my project at the stage just before the send
5) Do my Motion animation
6) Render in Motion in my timeline codec
7) drop the rendered shot above the original on the timeline

While I have not seen your problem with corrupting projects, I find that the round trip renders are INCREDIBLY slow. There seems to be some bug in this process that causes the system to lock up and beachball for long stretches. I have seen this behavior in FCP 5 and 6, with G5 and Intel machines. The only common thing is the Quadro 4500 card in the machines I have tried.

-Vance