An animation in 872 x 486 24 fps, about 5 minutes long, keeps crashing before it can finish rendering on my Mac Pro.
There are 4 characters, some with bones, a simple traced-image background that's animated, a bubble particle-effect, and stereo music that's 24bit 96khz.
The characters have animated layer fx such as shadow, shading, and HSV, together with blur and opacity.
What's making it crash? would I have to render some of these elements in sections and bring them back as movies? I'm especially confused because I've successfully rendered animations this long previously.
It could be a RAM issue. Are you using AS8, if so try turning off the auto-save feature under the preferences menu. This is a known problem. You can also try rendering the particles as a separate render and re-importing it as a movie like you mentioned. Depending on the particle count, this is most likely the problem.
I have that issue when I'm rendering in After effects, this happens when rendering to a movie file, I think it's because all the frames are held in memory until it is ready to be stitched into a movie, so the longer the segment rendered the more memory is neccessary.
This has always been a problem with software and complex scenes and not necessarily associated with Anime Studio particularly. The solution commonly taken is to render in layers and use a video editor to re-composite.