Why are my project file's getting so big?

[frozenintime]

yes, the .ptf file is what i'm talking about. sorry it took so long to get our terms straight!

i'm not sure why i'm having this problem now. i've certainly had more complex sessions in the past with more audio, MIDI, and effects sends. those .ptf files stay smaller somehow and certainly don't crash PT while saving backups in the background!

the odd thing is that i've pared things down quite - the song has been through 4 or 5 major revisions, but the evidence of all that work should be gone. it's really just 3 or 4 VI's, 6 or 7 vocal tracks, and a few reverbs. the VI's are fairly pedestrian except for a somewhat complex Battery patch. i've pared all that down, and the .ptf is still at 11 MB - bigger than other projects with more going on.

i've tried resaving the whole session in new locations, deleting unused regions over and over... i even deleted ALL unused/hidden playlists.

any thoughts?
i feel like something isn't adding up.

[daeron80]

That complex Battery patch could be it. Make a new session and import all tracks except the one(s) with Battery on it. See how big it is. Then import the Battery one(s). If it swells up to 11 at that point, then the size is not a problem, it's just the nature of the VI patch. In any event, it shouldn't cause it to crash unless your disc is ridiculously full and has no place to save. BTW, a hard disc is too full if it's past the 85% mark. At that point, you can expect to begin to see slowness, various strange problems, and data corruption.

[emorganproductions]

Hey Frozen,
Don't mean to talk the piss, but you seem pretty concerned about this. I when back and looked at the last 4 sessions I've been working on, and they're all around 7-8Mb, seems pretty standard to me. I'm not running any VIs, but some of the sessions are 50+ tracks, Eqs comps and verbs. but really, 7-8mb isn't worth getting excited over. we're talking about 1/100th of a GB, and at this very moment I have... 4000GB worth of harddrives sitting on my desk. why the big concern?

[Keybeeetsss]

^^^^I agree 100% with Evan which is why I said what I did on my 1st post...

[frozenintime]

hey all

the concern is that it's getting in the way of creativity.
having your session crash about half the time is a real vibe killer! i'm sure some can relate who have had mysterious problems like this.

i'm well aware of hard drive maintenance and there is an adequate amount of space on my record drive, and in any event, it only seems to be a problem with this session. i've tracked & mixed projects in PT constantly since switching from cubase a few years ago, some of which have 30-40 audio tracks and lots of EQs, comps, etc, as well all do these days!

thus, my interest in understanding what is happening under the hood was sparked. what would possibly make a relatively large .ptf file crash my system consistently when PT is saving a backup in the background? it doesn't add up, and i'm trying to further understand my pro tools is working so that i can avoid such an issue in the future. that's where i'm coming from.

best
b

[stustan]

My current project is 27MB with no problems

[emorganproductions]

you didn't mention your crashes in your original post. If your crashing 50% of the time, then it definitely doesn't have to do with the size of your session file. I'd look at plugins first and hard drives second. Are all your plug ins up to date? are there any plugs in your plugins folder that you don't need or aren't using anymore? If your crashes are consistent with automatic backup saving, is there a particular plugin that once inserted starts the backups failing? where are you saving your auto backups to? All things to think about.

[frozenintime]

hey all
yes, crashing was mentioned in the original post, but thank you for your thoughts on what to look out for.

i'm sure there are plug-ins i can remove, but the only real difference between this session and every other session (that does not quit when auto saving) is that it has a larger .ptf file. i'm not using any plug-ins i don't normally use - vintage warmer, smack, waves eq's and some stillwell audio plugins.

further, i noticed that when i actively weeded out unused regions, VI's and audio tracks (thus lowering the .ptf file size), the problem would go away. after doing more work and building the .ptf file size up again, the crashing would resume during auto saving. thus, i figured that the file size was the issue.

my backups are saved to the "Session File Backups" folder, the default setup.

i suppose the trouble could be my hard drive, but it really seems localized to this project, even after the aforementioned weeding out of unused elements and re-saving the entire session in new folders, etc.

a bit of a mystery!

[Carl Kolchak]

It's possible the session itself is corrupted, which can cause crashes, DAE errors etc, or prevent the session from even opening.

The first thing I would do is to open the session and choose "save copy in..." from the file menu.

Make sure that the session attributes (sample rate / bit depth etc) are correct and that the "copy all audio files" box is checked, then give the session a new name (defaults to "copy of ........") and choose a location for it.

Now close the current session and open your newly created version to see if that has solved the problem with it's stability.

If that doesn't work, as an alternative, you could create a brand new session and choose "Import session data" from the file menu, pointing to your original session and import everything from there.

As an aside, it can also help, in terms of general stability, to reduce the level of "undo" from 32 to 31, change the open ended disk allocation to a finite amount depending on the type of work you're doing (say 10 minutes), change the number of back-up sessions that are stored and how often they are saved - though none of these tweaks will have a direct bearing on your current problem.

[frozenintime]

hey carl

thanks for the suggestions. i've followed all the preferences-related ones, we'll see.

i've re-saved the entire project + audio files twice now, actually. weirdly, it seems to help for a while before the crashes start again. i was considering using 'import session data' as well.

best
b