Consolidation is taking WAY TOO LONG

[Picture Start]

I have a reel-length session (six, actually) and I'm trying to "flatten" all the edits for delivery to the studio archives. I'm using HD Native on a Mac with 24GB RAM, PT 10.3.3, and drives are Firewire 800. My selections are about 20-minutes long but to consolidate just one 5.0 or 5.1 track is taking between 10-20 minutes and I have about 40 of them to do per reel session. I'm seriously to the point of bussing and printing the whole session.

Has anybody seen this problem?

[KMcK]

That's very odd.

As a test I just consolidated a 5.1 stem from a 15 minute reel and it took less than a minute. PTHD Native 10.3.4 on 10.8.2 using a FW800 G-Drive.

Is the drive you're writing the files to being used for any other file transfers while you're doing your consolidating? Or anything else accessing / using the drive at all? Does the drive have plenty of free space on it?

Do you any other drives and/or projects you could do a similar test with to see if it's isolated to the drive or the specific PT session?

[Picture Start]

Originally Posted by KMcK

That's very odd.

As a test I just consolidated a 5.1 stem from a 15 minute reel and it took less than a minute. PTHD Native 10.3.4 on 10.8.2 using a FW800 G-Drive.

Is the drive you're writing the files to being used for any other file transfers while you're doing your consolidating? Or anything else accessing / using the drive at all? Does the drive have plenty of free space on it?

Do you any other drives and/or projects you could do a similar test with to see if it's isolated to the drive or the specific PT session?

No other activity on the drive, but I think the space is getting fairly low (about 50GB left). Also, I'm going to try toggling RAM cache on and off and see if that helps. It may be that if the Cache meter doesn't get all the way to 100%, it happens. Thanks for trying something out.

I will also try changing the disk allocation to another drive. This drive may be questionable.

[dford]

Originally Posted by Picture Start

No other activity on the drive, but I think the space is getting fairly low (about 50GB left). Also, I'm going to try toggling RAM cache on and off and see if that helps. It may be that if the Cache meter doesn't get all the way to 100%, it happens. Thanks for trying something out.

I will also try changing the disk allocation to another drive. This drive may be questionable.

Please keep us posted...

I have a system that is similar that periodically suffers from the same issue. I think it was a suspect system drive, even though it past all tests. When I first ran a disk verification it had some errors, an fsck in SUM fixed those but the issues remained. I think it's been better since I cloned off the drive to a new system drive.

Dev

[Buccanears]

Also try deleting databases. Fixed up a system that was having similar problems.

[ejwells]

Originally Posted by dford

an fsck in SUM

A clouded profanity infraction, and also a spelling infraction.
It's to the corner with ye, to ponder your behavior!

[Picture Start]

I think I have a bad FW drive in the chain. I'm getting much better results by changing the Disk Allocation to an internal drive, but keeping the main session on the necessary firewire drive. Will do the databases thing—haven't done that in a year.

Thanks again.

[25ghosts]

Originally Posted by Picture Start

I have a reel-length session (six, actually) and I'm trying to "flatten" all the edits for delivery to the studio archives. I'm using HD Native on a Mac with 24GB RAM, PT 10.3.3, and drives are Firewire 800. My selections are about 20-minutes long but to consolidate just one 5.0 or 5.1 track is taking between 10-20 minutes and I have about 40 of them to do per reel session. I'm seriously to the point of bussing and printing the whole session.

Has anybody seen this problem?

Perhaps your drive is fragmented or reaching full capacity.

Try this

Go to the Finder and try to copy 200MB from the system drive to the drive where you are experiencing the problems... If you have the same problem, the drive is getting full and PT is not to blame... If you are not, there might be a bug somewhere in PT.

[steppenwolf68]

Out of curiosity: in session setup window, is "interleaved" turned on ?
If so turn it off and check if it is the same speed...

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by steppenwolf68

Out of curiosity: in session setup window, is "interleaved" turned on ?

Nothing to do with read/write performance. One stereo interleaved file equals to two separate mono files, etc. This is all about reading and writing bytes, and the performance of the storage system is everything that matters.

You can ease this a lot by assinging the tracks to another drive, which would mean that new writes would occur on the new drive and the reads would occur on the original drive, thus theoretically reducing the processing time 50%. Theoretically. In reality it is a lot less, because there will be less (random) reads and more (continuous) writes.

Just do the math. 20 minutes of 24 bit 48kHz audio takes approximately 1.3GB per mono track. If you have "about 40 of them (5.1 tracks)" that means +300GB needs to be written to the disk. If the disk performs about 100MB/sec this job will take about an hour to complete, in best circumstances.

Add more disks to cut the time. Can't beat the laws of physics...