I have a job due soon that I’m editing and GUI performance is pretty terrible. When I get past a certain zoom level performance slows to a crawl. I have not had problems with timelines this length and size before. AAF has maybe 20-30 tracks or so, nothing out of the ordinary, and the timeline is 42 minutes. Converted video to both DNxHR LB and to HD 36.
I tried rebuilding .csh as well as .peak files, and also tried getting rid of video file from project.
Project imported audio files as .mxf rather than .wav files and I would try to convert it all to .wav but it’s about 30GB so I wanted to first see if anyone here has any experience with this before converting.
Yes, but I typically don’t get .mxf on import, it’s usually .wav. I’m just trying to isolate everything that’s different with this project compared to the rest of the ones I’ve done this week.
DOP processes should have nothing to do with this, right? The only other difference in my project is I’m testing out Fabfilter Pro-Q4 as DOP for now, instead of in an insert. But I’d figure that should just be a matter of reading files off a drive.
I usually do almost everything in DOP and with the project size you described I never get a sluggish GUI.
But if there is even a hint of active extensions in any event, things come to a crawl.
So in your position I’d select all events and see if I can choose either “make extension permanent” or “no extension” and see if that solves the issue.
Another shot would be to check if the AAF didn’t come by any chance with an exceedingly long timeline? You could go into project settings and set the end of the timeline to just after your program ends. Perhaps it is set to days long and this is causing the sluggishness?
Have you copied all files to the project folder, using “prepare archive”? Wouldn’t hurt to try, for the sake of thoroughness.
And lastly, I’ve had in the past some projects that just were problem makers. They behaved badly with no explanation. So another thing you can try is to create a new project altogether, in a new folder, and import the tracks from this project into that one. You can even do it in groups of tracks and check if you can find a culprit among the tracks, for instance.
Extensions - I never leave them active and just double checked and that isn’t it.
Timeline - is only 3hrs.
Prepare archive - I did that earlier.
Import into new project - yeah I may have to try that at some point. I’m really trying to avoid time consuming solutions since I have to turn this around by tomorrow.
Also noticed that it now takes longer to open than it should. Looking at task manager I think the load goes up when I get these problems. Not seeing any problems with high load on storage for example (nvme PCIe 4.0). It’s perplexing.
Just out of interest what is the RAM usage with the project when it hits the sluggish state? And are there any really big single events in the project split into many hundreds/thousands of little events?
Taking into consideration your deadline, maybe a quick try on a copy of the project, anywhere where there are tracks with multiple split events from the same audio file) glue those events together so they are now large ‘parts’. See if the sluggish issue goes away. As a process of elimination…..
Just to let you know that today as I approached the end of a feature mix, the project started getting extremely sluggish behavior in regards to the GUI.
Like I make a range selection and it freezes for a couple of seconds kind of sluggish. I never got this exact behavior before, and some tracks were worse than others.
Also, it wasn’t constant;. It would be very bad for a while, then go back to normal, then get bad again.
The only two things I think could think of were:
I had four or five very long events with dxRevive in DOP on them.
This is an animation film with extensive sound design and SFX, and I have never used so much automation before like I have in this film. There must be 15X as much automation than any other project I’ve worked on, and this time I’ve automated a lot of EQ.
Apart from these two aspects I hasn’t really deviated from other projects I’ve worked on.
Just chiming in cause I remembered this post and thought another account could help furhter with narrowing things down.
Please tell us what you find if you investigate this further.
thanks!
ive noticed sluggish gui with referenced media coming from a network or slow drive that my project didnt think it was. This was from importing session data - there is a issue with referenced media when doing that. May not be connected but thought I share in case
First update; I did a Backup of a shorter version of the same job, an episode trailer (2min) plus 6 or so short promos at 20seconds each and the new project folder was about 1GB whereas the original is a whopping 14GB.
In the process of doing this I selected to minimize audio files and make processing permanent.
This seems to have solved the problem, which was present mainly at horizontally zoomed-in levels. It makes me think it has to do with visual waveform representation.
I will test this further.
Question: The manual states that “Making offline processing permanent cannot be undone” - does that mean that the audio files on disk that were created by the DOP process get deleted, or does it only mean that new files are created and the references to the old disappear?
In other words, if I have this large project and make all DOP permanent will I forever lose the ability to undo or tweak settings even if I did a save-as to create a new project before executing this command?
Basically I want to see if it’s the DOP that’s the problem or something else, and this is the only way I can think of without having to copy/paste the entire project folder onto another drive and rename that etc… since the folder is pretty large.
Hey, i just tested that last week on a short project that was revised and subsequently rolled back.
In short: DOP ‘make all permanent’ function is only related to ‘stacked copies’. Say you have processes on a voice clip, than the original file is still in tact but replaced by 4 different temp files. You are listening to (and looking at) that last processed file. When you make that permanent Nuendo deletes the 3 earlier processed files. You are left with an original and a piece of that (with processing).
i checked this and on my mac with latest n14 this is how it works for me.
If you saved an earlier copy name of project and not applied ‘make direct offline edits permanent’ the audio file should still be in a non destructive state in this project i.e. you can still remove the offline Processing even though the newer project DOP is made permanent.
When the Offline edits are made permanent (in another named project) a new copy of the audio will be(should be) automatically created with a numerical suffix.
However! There will be files in the projects ‘edits’ folder, when you go back to the older project with the non permanent DOP file. When removing the DOP it will sound correct as original but you will get a notification in the audio pool if opening the file in explorer saying that the edited file sounds different from original.
If you use ‘Backup Project’ to a new location with any project using the option of make DOP permanent on saving it is going to clean up everything (there wont be an edit folder in the project location anymore) and forever make permanent.
After I left my computer off overnight, including turning off the PSU switch and holding the power button for 30 seconds, it was functioning perfectly the following day. No hiccups or lags.
Although during the troublesome session I had been working with H264 video and later converted it to ProRes, this step seemed to have helped just a bit, but not much.
I guess my computer just needed a good night of sleep… much like myself.
I’ve now tried to delete DOP which doesn’t seem to help in most cases, I tried to make it permanent, same thing, I also tried backing up the project with both only “minimize” and with that and “make DOP permanent” selected. Same lag in all cases.
One thing I noted was that Nuendo seems to respect the file format when doing a backup. This particular project came from an AAF with .mxf containers and it backs it up as such. If the project contains .wav then .wav is in the resulting audio files folder.
I tried to bounce several events into new ones and once I did the problem went away. Bounced files conforms to the selected audio files type in project settings.
New question: Is there a way to just convert containers from .mxf to .wav?
It’s really the one thing I’d like to test now to see if there’s a problem specifically with that and “Backup” doesn’t seem to do it.
@MattiasNYC you can just go to the Pool window, select whatever files you want to convert, right-click, choose convert files, and you will get a dialog where you can choose from a variety of formats, including WAV and BWF. You can also choose how the project will deal with the converted files.