[HugoC]

We are a film post production company and we have been having a problem for some time with sessions containing a lot of audio files. We create these sessions by importing all the rushes of a film in order to proceed to auto-conform later on. This is a lot of data.

We noticed that sessions took much longer to open from version 2020.9 onwards, for sessions created in version 2019.12. To give an order of magnitude, for a session containing 760 GB of rushes, it takes 1 minute to open in 2019.12 and 12 minutes in 2020.9 and beyond (we tested up to version 2021.12 and found the problem with each version).

The problem is even wider as importing audio files takes much longer than before. The files are simply added to the session, not copied.
We conducted tests in the same versions of Pro Tools, importing 160 GB of rushes. In 2019.12, importing audio files takes about 15 minutes, including the time to stamp the files with a new unique ID. In 2020.9 and beyond, we stopped the processes after 3 hours before they finished, so the files were not even imported into the session.

The files are stored in a USB 3.2 connected hard drive, and all the tests were done on this same drive. It is a Seagate BarraCuda 4Tb HDD (ST4000DM004). We work with these drives all the time, they are very fast and we never have any speed problems with them.

We ran these tests on :
- Version 2019.12: Mac Pro 5.1 with MacOS 10.12.6, 2x2.4Ghz Quad, 24GB RAM, GC ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024MB
- Version 2020.9 : Mac Pro 5.1 with MacOS 10.12.6, 2x2.4Ghz Quad, 48 Go RAM, GC Radeon RX 560 4Go
- Version 2021.12: Mac Pro 6.1 with MacOS 10.15.3, Intel Xeon E5 2.7 Ghz 12Core, 64 GB RAM, GC AMD FirePro D700 6GB, HDx 3

We would like to know if other film post-production studios are experiencing this kind of problem and if any solutions have been found, and also to alert Avid to the problem, so that a solution can be found.

Thank you very much and have a nice day!