Rendering Problem

I am new to Toon Boom Harmony and I was trying to render my first animation last night. It would get to 42 frames (the bar said 12%), then it would lock up for 5 to 10 minutes and finally say the program was “Not Responding”.

I am using the “Render Write Nodes” under “File” to begin the process - is this the correct way to do it?
Also- I have quite a few layers (around 25 bitmap images - though they are sized right at 1920x1080 and are not overly large) (3 sound files- 1 is dialogue and the other two are just sound effects here and there) and the animation is 2978 frames long - IS THIS TOO LARGE to render all in one shot. I have read online that you should break projects up, BUT if it’s stalling out before it even renders 50 frames that doesn’t seem right.
Perhaps there are things I can do to “clean it up” or “flatten it out” or something to make it more manageable?

Thanks in advance. I was googling all day yesterday trying to find info, but there just isn’t a lot of info out there on rendering troubleshooting.

You need to be aware that all those bitmaps you imported are loaded into
your graphic card’s memory at the same time. You system may be stalling
because the system RAM is full and the cache is being used. Try optimizing
the project first.

On the Render tab of the preferences you can set up some cache disk
space and also set the rendering threads to the number of CPUs you have
which may speed things up a bit.

Also try rendering only to bitmap sequence only. If that’s faster, select both
“Drawing” and “Movie” options in the write node because it takes less
resources to render bitmaps and the bitmaps are used to make the movie.
This is more efficient memory-wise than rendering to movie directly.

Beyond that, to work efficiently in the software make sure to keep each scene
to one shot and don’t make the entire movie in one scene.