Prevent Pro Tools from disabling screensaver on Windows 10

[dgdsu]

Hello everyone,

I hope you are well in these strange times!

As the title says, we have very expensive color grading computer displays running and this is a shared Audio and Video editing / Color grading suite which does has a minor issue which is not that minor at a second look:

When Pro Tools is running it somehow hijacks and locks the system settings for screensaving without notifying the user and it ignores the screensaver (go to black) setting to keep it up all the time. What is more then problematic since the expensive color grading displays run into the risk of burn out in times when a longer meeting call comes in or the studio break takes longer but sessions need to stay open.

While arguing if this is best practise for some reasons or not the even more problematic issue is that it doesn't tell the user, so we were very surprised when we came back into the enginieering room finding the displays running and showing the open static Pro Tools windows for 2 hours now. Which is not good.

Any ideas what is going on or if there is any "hidden setting" or manual way to change that behaviour which seems somewhat intended and not able to turn off.

(My specs: Windows 10 Pro x64 with Intel Xeon CPU E5-2630 v4 @ 2.20GHz, 2201 Mhz, 10/20 Core(s) - 64 GB Ram - AVID Pro Tools (Native) - AVID Media Composer - AVID Eucon artist series)

[Wolfgang Eller]

As you can read here (go to Adjust Power Options) there is no option to activate the screensaver.
Why not switching off your monitor when it isn't needed?

[dgdsu]

Originally Posted by Wolfgang Eller

As you can read here (go to Adjust Power Options) there is no option to activate the screensaver.
Why not switching off your monitor when it isn't needed?

Thanks for your thoughts. Very much appreciated! Well - first - the position of them is not that distinct to do that frequenty stretching the arms over the mixing console to that. The pther mention: yeah I know this link, but I hoped there something more we can do here (like or trick or something to wokr around this)

[Wolfgang Eller]

What about a HDMI switch box with remote?
I think it's better to switch the input as to switch the power.
Is your monitor able to go into black (instead of blue or whatever) if there's no input?

[ChuckS]

You can set an override for process power requests. Run a Command window as Administrator (Win-R, type cmd, ctrl-shift-enter). Type or copy paste this at the command prompt:
powercfg /requestsoverride process ProTools.exe display
Press enter to override the PT setting. This is persistent in the power settings for the machine and should allow the displays to be powered off as defined in the active Power Plan. To remove the override use
powercfg /requestsoverride process ProTools.exe

Don't know why PT interrupts the display power off so there may be unanticipated issues/consequences here, but it's a pretty benign setting. UAYOR

[dgdsu]

Originally Posted by Wolfgang Eller

What about a HDMI switch box with remote?

Excellent point! Will consider this. From what I remember (not in the suite atm) they would go idle/black and power safe, which would be great.

Originally Posted by ChuckS

You can set an override for process power requests. Run a Command window as Administrator (Win-R, type cmd, ctrl-shift-enter). Type or copy paste this at the command prompt:
powercfg /requestsoverride process ProTools.exe display
Press enter to override the PT setting. This is persistent in the power settings for the machine and should allow the displays to be powered off as defined in the active Power Plan. To remove the override use
powercfg /requestsoverride process ProTools.exe

Smart solution too! And yeah, don't worry - I am a terminal user and partly develop tools here for our needs. So command line basic info not required for hinting on such ideas. But very kind of you to explain in detail. Who can know the users asking And thanks for bringing powercfg back to mind. I should also run powercfg /energy first and check what's going on there to not accidently overlook some issues.

@ both - Thanks for your thoughts and time on this! Please take care and stay safe!

--
Windows 10 Pro x64 with Intel Xeon CPU E5-2630 v4 @ 2.20GHz, 2201 Mhz, 10/20 Core(s) - 64 GB Ram - AVID Pro Tools (Native) - AVID Media Composer - AVID Eucon artist series

[ChuckS]

If you run powercfg /requests while PT is running, you can see that PT has a display entry. That's what's disabling the counter for screensaver.

[dgdsu]

Originally Posted by ChuckS

If you run powercfg /requests while PT is running...

Even better! True, that is! Thanks, take care, please stay safe and have a nice weekend.

[dgdsu]

For those interested in this thread here comes an update to share it with the world and a follow-up question to finalize it.

For some reason with Windows system changes maybe or because of Pro Tools may have changed the method overriding the display energy saving settings so that

powercfg /requestsoverride process ProTools.exe display

seems to have no effect no more (but thanks for sharing the great idea before). The requestsoverride is listed correctly but without preventing Pro Tools changing the Display settings. Tried both: adding ProTools.exe and full path to the ProTools.exe process like listed under powercfg /requests to the requests overrides -- NOTE: If you think it actually should still work or still works for you and I maybe miss something here, let me know.

Here are 2 possible starting points regarding Windows why it maybe does not work no more: https://www.tenforums.com/performanc...esnt-work.html and https://superuser.com/questions/1394...questsoverride

I now came up with another idea to override the override so to say (hah) and run a useful copy pasted script somebody gave me somewhere else (will try to remember to give correct credit) which switches the power plan to override the override of Pro Tools back to your default. I post it here and hope to find somebody helping me to merge that with the pro tools start app action in a useful way. In the moment I just run it as a .cmd after Pro Tools has started.

You need to find at least 2 of your power scheme GUIDs for this to work. Usually a 8-4-4-4-12 digits number which I will demonstrate here as a xxxx and a yyyy line for 2 different schemes for now. You will get the active GUID by running powercfg /GetActiveScheme. Running it on 2 different Schemes makes it possible to check if one of them is running and to activate the other to override Pro Tools overrides.

The "switchpowerplan.cmd" file I have on my desktop (to click on after Pro Tools has successfully started) looks like this:

@Echo off
setlocal
SET highperf=Power Scheme GUID: xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx 
 (High performance)
Powercfg -getactivescheme > switchpowerplan_tmp.txt
SET /p active= < switchpowerplan_tmp.txt
IF "%active%" == "%highperf%" (
Powercfg -s yyyyyyyy-yyyy-yyyy-yyyy-yyyyyyyyyyyy
) ELSE (
Powercfg -s xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx
)
DEL switchpowerplan_tmp.txt
endlocal
@Echo on
Powercfg -getactivescheme
PAUSE

Now it would be great to have a batch file from where we start Pro Tools, then we run a timer and fire this switchpowerplan.cmd a minute after Pro Tools has started, to make sure that it won't come in too early.

So far the idea Now I need some help of others to finish it so that we can share it to the world.