Extremely slow loading projects
by Chris Blair
on
May 20, 2008 at 2:11:08 am
We're running CS3 on an HP xw6200 with 2, dual-core processors, 4GB RAM, plenty of drive storage. Have been through all the tweaks and configuration tips on here and on Adobe's CS3 forums, including removing the OpenGL plug-in.
Also tested all hardware and confirmed it's fine. (motherboard, RAM and hard drive are all brand new, replaced by HP under warranty less than 2 months ago).
We use VelocityQ and typically use .dps files on timelines as well as photoshop comps, and possibly .tga, .jpg or .tif files...and occasionally a quicktime shot from a stock library.
The problem is certain projects take literally 5 minutes to load. Once loaded, these projects have trouble during preview renders and with general stability, occasionally crashing the program.
Many, many other projects (equally complex), run fine with no issues of any sort. We cannot identify any significant difference in terms of project files, plug-ins used, etc.
We've tried one by one deleting plug-ins from the project, deleting various project files etc. to try to get to the root of the problem, all to no avail. We've tried importing these projects into new projects with no improvement.
I'm sure it's probably something so simple that we're just missing it, but anyone else experience this with certain projects?
One difference I've noticed is the problem files all have Quicktime movies in them along with the .dps files...but we have other projects mixing these that work fine.
Could mixing certain quicktime movies with .dps files in a CS3 project cause this kind of slowdown? We've done all the codec checks and we have no broken or missing codecs, and the computer runs fine otherwise.
Any suggestions appreciated as this is driving us crazy.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
www.videomi.com
Re: Extremely slow loading projects by Dave LaRonde on May 20, 2008 at 2:59:17 pm
[Chris Blair]"We use VelocityQ and typically use .dps files on timelines as well as photoshop comps, and possibly .tga, .jpg or .tif files...and occasionally a quicktime shot from a stock library. "
I'd say it's the footage you're using. Instead of those VelocityQ and dps files, change them to something more generic, like uncompressed AVIs.
I'd start with the dps files. If memory serves me well, that's a file extension for DIVX, and as a former host on this forum used to say, "DIVX is evil." The reason: they've done so darned much tweaking and adjusting to DIVX that it can be hard to keep up with the changes. Besides, DIVX is more of a delivery file than an intermediate file, which is the best thing to use in AE.
If you've got those DIVX files in a higher-quality form, you'll definitely see an improvement in the quality of your AE renders, and it just might solve your slow load times.
But don't overlook those VelocityQ files, either. If they need hardware (a card) to read them, they may not run on machines without the corresponding software codec.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV (ABC) Cedar Rapids, IA
Re: Extremely slow loading projects by Chris Blair on May 21, 2008 at 2:12:26 am
Dave,
The .dps extension is the VelocityQ's file format...and this particular system uses the software codec for i/o. The other 3 systems in our building use a hardware codec since they have the hardware and corresponding i/o plug-ins to read/write the files.
Perhaps that's the issue since the problem occurs almost exclusively on this machine. We'll try deleting those files from the problem timelines and see what happens. I thought I had our AE artist do this...but maybe not.
Odd that it only happens on CS3 though since we've used the .dps software codec on systems without the VelocityQ hardware with AE versions 5, 5.5, 7 and now CS3...and none of the earlier versions exhibited this sort of slowdown.
I'd start with the dps files. If memory serves me well, that's a file extension for DIVX, and as a former host on this forum used to say, "DIVX is evil." The reason: they've done so darned much tweaking and adjusting to DIVX that it can be hard to keep up with the changes. Besides, DIVX is more of a delivery file than an intermediate file, which is the best thing to use in AE.
If you've got those DIVX files in a higher-quality form, you'll definitely see an improvement in the quality of your AE renders, and it just might solve your slow load times.
But don't overlook those VelocityQ files, either. If they need hardware (a card) to read them, they may not run on machines without the corresponding software codec.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
www.videomi.com
