Fade editor becoming sluggish & PMX crashes

[Will Brown]

Hello, any help on the following two much appreciated.
I'm currently editing a project with a large number of fades (1000+) but only 4tr and at times the fade editor is quite sluggish i.e. if I move a fade there is a delay before it jumps into place, also when moving audio. I had no problems when the project was smaller and it is not always bad now, but on and off. I've checked to see if other things were happening on the computer but could find nothing. I've had had a few playback stalls though generally playback for auditions has been snappy even when the fade editor is slow.
It is a project with a lot of edits and I can therefore understand that this is most likely a hardwear issue. What I don't know is what part the computer is not keeping up.......is it the RAM, the processor, the hard drives..... or all of these?
I have a 3.0 Ghz processor, 1gb ram (533) and operating system and media files on seperate 7200rpm hard drives.
My second issue is that very recently PMX has crashed twice in the last 1/2 hour while is the editing window (still editing the same project). Could this be due to hardwear overload? Also auto-save does not appear to do it's job consistently. When set to 10 mins the most recent auto save after the crash was over 1 1/2 hours when the last manual save was 1/2 hour ago.

Thanks Will

[Silas]

Hi Will,

Not sure if I have the answer but PMX has a history of getting cranky with lots of edits / large projects sizes. They continue to work on it...

What version are you on?

I would turn Auto-Save OFF and get used to hitting ctrl-S all the time. Auto-Save has never worked well and often gets in the way / interrupts work flow. Definitely turn Auto-Backup on and assign a destination folder so that every time you hit ctrl-S it will save another version of the project on a different drive (I use the boot drive for this).

You may want to consider adding Ram at some point but that CPU should be able to handle multitrack editing without issue.

Hope this helps,
Silas

[Will Brown]

Thanks,
I shall swop my sound card to a my new computer I have just built, which has 2gb ram and hopefully this will sort or help the problem.

I'm currently running 5.0 sp3 and am always a bit wary of "upgrades" without reason. Do you know of any significant improvements or issues in 5.1 sp3 ?

Cheers Will

[Will Brown]

Forgot to say, thanks for the auto save advice too. I'm sure it is sound advice and I shall start doing things that way.

Will

[Silas]

Hi Will,

Personally I'm staying put at 5.0 SP3 for a while. Don't know about others but I like to stay behind the bleeding edge at least a little.

-Silas

[Will Brown]

I have now changed to my newer faster computer (dual 2.33, 2gb 800ram) and disabled auto save and things did seem to be running better.

However....

I have experienced one crash and it deleted the current project file I was working from!!!! When I went to re-open the project the most recent edl was nowhere to be seen. The backup and the clone of the file fortunately did still exist but they were 20 mins old and I'm 99.9% sure I had saved at least twice in those last 20mins as I had been saving after every edit.

For now I'm pressing on and checking the file has updated periodically, but this is a worrying episode. Perhaps I need to split this project in half?

Will

[Silas]

Hi Will,

Yikes! Do you by any chance have anything typed into the 'Notes' Tab? I have had those suicidal crashes from PMX only when I've used that Tab...

Hope others have some ideas.

-Silas

[Ricardo Ryan]

Hi Silas,

Could indeed be Notes related, according to the version used.

Just to let you know that the Notes Tab crash MT001309 is fixed since the Pyramix 5.1SP1, so you no longer should encounter this problem.


Regards,
Ricardo

Merging Technologies

[Steve]

edit
I have experienced one crash and it deleted the current project file I was working from!!!! When I went to re-open the project the most recent edl was nowhere to be seen. The backup and the clone of the file fortunately did still exist but they were 20 mins old and I'm 99.9% sure I had saved at least twice in those last 20mins as I had been saving after every edit.

For now I'm pressing on and checking the file has updated periodically, but this is a worrying episode. Perhaps I need to split this project in half?

Will

Hi Will,
I don't know about the notes problem mentioned below but I've had rotten luck with Pyramix v5.1.13sp3 and have had several projects 'disappear' in the manner you described. I have been able to salvage most of my work form the 'backup' folder. Here's a thread with some info:

http://forum.merging.com/viewtopic.php?t=3194

I went to v5.1.13sp3 because because when I tried to open projects created in 5.0 in 5.1 my wav files were missing and I got the dreaded construction tape. So I don't know what version to recommend to you, but beware of 5.1.13sp3.

Steve

[rjas]

Hi Will,

I don't have any useful advice for you I'm afraid, but I did want to second what other people have said:

- If you are still using 5.0 SP3, don't ever leave the "Name" box on the Notes tab empty or Pyramix will bomb out and delete your .pmx file and the alternate backup!

- If you are using the latest release (5.1 SP3), if the project starts to get sluggish keep an eye on your virtual memory usage and restart before it gets anywhere near 1.5GB, otherwise you may also lose your project file. Bizarrely, this problem seems to only affect some projects - some of my large edits are fine, but others start misbehaving after only an hour or so. I haven't managed to work out what the differences are between the projects that edit ok and those that grind to a halt.

- Never rely on the Pyramix autosave or you will lose work! I have learnt this to my cost after 4 years of using SADiE - which has a perfect auto-recovery feature so I became lax at saving. I never lost a minute of work on SADiE, whereas in total Pyramix has probably cost me hours or even days. I'm getting better at hitting Ctrl-S now though!


Does anyone know if there will be another release of 5.x before 6.0? It would be nice to have a dependable release of version 5 before having to jump to a major new release which will probably bring with it a whole new set of bugs. Can anyone at Merging let us know?

If I didn't love the Pyramix interface and fade editor so much, I would probably be recycling the old Micro$oft joke by now about customers paying for the privilege of being beta testers months after the software has allegedly been released...

Happy editing,
Rich

[Ricardo Ryan]

Hi Rich,

- If you are still using 5.0 SP3, don't ever leave the "Name" box on the Notes tab empty or Pyramix will bomb out and delete your .pmx file and the alternate backup!

This was happening under specific conditions only and is fixed since in 5.1SP1

If you are using the latest release (5.1 SP3), if the project starts to get sluggish keep an eye on your virtual memory usage and restart before it gets anywhere near 1.5GB, otherwise you may also lose your project file. Bizarrely, this problem seems to only affect some projects - some of my large edits are fine, but others start misbehaving after only an hour or so. I haven't managed to work out what the differences are between the projects that edit ok and those that grind to a halt.

Yes, there is indeed a known similar issue relating to this Memory problem, Steve pointed out the correct post link on this matter.

- Never rely on the Pyramix autosave or you will lose work! I have learnt this to my cost after 4 years of using SADiE - which has a perfect auto-recovery feature so I became lax at saving. I never lost a minute of work on SADiE, whereas in total Pyramix has probably cost me hours or even days. I'm getting better at hitting Ctrl-S now though!

We'd be curious to know more on this, if you can describe the problem and have reproduction steps.

Does anyone know if there will be another release of 5.x before 6.0? It would be nice to have a dependable release of version 5 before having to jump to a major new release which will probably bring with it a whole new set of bugs. Can anyone at Merging let us know?

For now we have separate branching, V5.x and V6.x we did not see the immediate need for releasing a 5.1SP4 version, since we are concentrating our efforts on V6.x.
But if very necessary and if a major showstopper would arise we are willing to; listen, fix it and make it available.


Regards,
Ricardo

QA & Project Manager
Merging Technologies

[Graemme]

Sadie's auto-save' works in the background (as it should) and the Pyramix 'auto-save' works in the foreground (as I wish it didn't).

Graemme

[rjas]

Hi Ricardo,

Regarding the Pyramix auto-save:

I watched the auto-save file for the project that I was editing all day yesterday and it saved every 10 minutes without fail - as it was set to do.

This morning I have been editing a different project with auto-save still set to 10 minutes. The time-stamp for the auto-save file kept updating as I would expect it to from 9:05am to 9:15am to 9:25am etc. However, the auto-save file did not change between 10:35 and 10:55. The auto-saves at 10:55, 11:05 and 11:15 have been ok. So is it possible that at 10:45 I was doing something within Pyramix that made it miss the auto-save? e.g. pressing play or opening a dialogue box at exactly the same time?

In the past when Pyramix has crashed and deleted my project file for one of the reasons discussed earlier, I have gone to the auto-save file to recover my work but the file has been much more than 10 minutes out of date (sometimes 30 minutes or more). Has anyone else apart from Will noticed this?

The alternate backup feature wouldn't help in this situation, as whenever Pyramix has crashed and deleted my project file, the alternate backup has always disappeared too. It is in situations like this that I would like to be able to depend on the auto-save.

If Pyramix misses say 1 in 10 auto-saves for whatever reason, I guess a workaround would be to set the auto-save to a much shorter time so that at least the last save will be more recent. However, with a large EDL, it would be frustrating having to wait every couple of minutes while it auto-saves.

Regards
Rich

[avi]

Hi - just to chip in - I too have noticed these very issues in various flavours of v.5.

The "running out of memory" issue has a strange thing about it (- I have suffered from it in the past though not heavily) - just that it doesn't necessarily occur in a project where one might think the memory usage would be particularly high. Some projects with many tracks and edits work fine, some much simpler ones exhibt undesirable symptoms. Wierd!

I think all of us on v5 would appreciate a firmly stable version without the bugs and workarounds.


AVI

[Ricardo Ryan]

Hi Rich,

This morning I have been editing a different project with auto-save still set to 10 minutes. The time-stamp for the auto-save file kept updating as I would expect it to from 9:05am to 9:15am to 9:25am etc. However, the auto-save file did not change between 10:35 and 10:55. The auto-saves at 10:55, 11:05 and 11:15 have been ok. So is it possible that at 10:45 I was doing something within Pyramix that made it miss the auto-save? e.g. pressing play or opening a dialogue box at exactly the same time?

It is possible that if there were interaction e.g. a playback during the schedule auto-save that the save got by passed, and did not kick in right after the stop playback. This would explain the fact that some auto-save never occured.

In the past when Pyramix has crashed and deleted my project file for one of the reasons discussed earlier, I have gone to the auto-save file to recover my work but the file has been much more than 10 minutes out of date (sometimes 30 minutes or more). Has anyone else apart from Will noticed this?

As explain above, bug id MT001090 is the save schedule bug problem due to interaction.

The alternate backup feature wouldn't help in this situation, as whenever Pyramix has crashed and deleted my project file, the alternate backup has always disappeared too. It is in situations like this that I would like to be able to depend on the auto-save.

Hmmm, this is strange, I would not have think that the Back up would disappear in such a crash, we'll verify.

If Pyramix misses say 1 in 10 auto-saves for whatever reason, I guess a workaround would be to set the auto-save to a much shorter time so that at least the last save will be more recent. However, with a large EDL, it would be frustrating having to wait every couple of minutes while it auto-saves.

We have a Request id MT001118 this is to have the Autosave done as a background task, so not preventing any interraction.[/quote]

Regards,
Ricardo

Merging Technologies