Here's one thing that might ease the pain a little: calculate and save the images in the movie one by one, saving them all to a directory. Once done, read them all back in and export to the movie. The first step is something like:

Do[thisImg = (* define your images here *);
    Export[path ~~ folder ~~ ToString[PaddedForm[r, {4, 2}]] ~~ ".jpg", 
    thisImg];, {r, 1, 500, 1}];

Of course you might prefer to save to a .png file and you may need to Rasterize (depending on what your graphics are). Once all the individual frames are stored in one folder, you can read them all in and make the movie:

path = "/Users/Desktop/folderName/" ~~ folder ~~ "/";
fileNames = FileNames["*.jpg", path];
graphics = Table[Import[fileNames[[num]]], {num, 1, Length[fileNames]}];
Export["/Users/Desktop/" ~~ folder ~~ ".mov", graphics];

Dividing the process this way allows you to catch mistakes at intermediate points where they can be mor easily fixed.

Here's one thing that might ease the pain a little: calculate and save the images in the movie one by one, saving them all to a directory. Once done, read them all back in and export to the movie. The first step is something like:

Do[thisImg = (* define your images here *);
    Export[path ~~ folder ~~ ToString[PaddedForm[r, {4, 2}]] ~~ ".jpg", 
    thisImg];, {r, 1, 500, 1}];

As jens points out, if you have already generated all the plots, you can simplify some of the book-keeping by using the VideoFrames option, which automatically labels the file names sequentially

Export["plot001.png", plots, "VideoFrames"];

Of course you might prefer to save to a .png file and you may need to Rasterize (depending on what your graphics are). Once all the individual frames are stored in one folder, you can read them all in and make the movie:

path = "/Users/Desktop/folderName/" ~~ folder ~~ "/";
fileNames = FileNames["*.jpg", path];
graphics = Table[Import[fileNames[[num]]], {num, 1, Length[fileNames]}];
Export["/Users/Desktop/" ~~ folder ~~ ".mov", graphics];

Dividing the process this way allows you to catch mistakes at intermediate points where they can be mor easily fixed.