W10, PT 2022.9 - No sleep till Brooklyn?

[Led]

Is this a thing now? I just upgraded from a much older version to 2022.9 and my screens don't seem to sleep with PT open. My drives are set to not sleep, but surely the screen sleep shouldn't be a problem... it worked fine on PT12..

[sw rec]

Could you provide LESS system info?
https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=300050
In any event, you’ll find the majority of us have our power plans set to “always on.” Everything.

[junkgear]

On my Windows 11 system, PT acts the same way. My screens actually seem to get brighter when PT starts, which makes me think they may be disabling power saving Windows features to make sure performance doesn't suffer. Why the screens always stay on, beats me.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Led

Is this a thing now? I just upgraded from a much older version to 2022.9 and my screens don't seem to sleep with PT open. My drives are set to not sleep, but surely the screen sleep shouldn't be a problem... it worked fine on PT12..

Last Exit to Brooklyn.

Pro Tools likely now uses SetThreadExecutionState with ES_DISPLAY_REQUIRED which will stop the system letting the display sleep, but I'm not picking thought stuff now confirming it does that. This might be a misunderstanding of the use of this, I'm not following why it was needed but maybe there is a case it was. I would have expected there is enough separate control of power and GPU here that it's not necessary. But if it's a problem for you exit the app., or if it somehow causes a real problem/impacts productivity file a support case.

[Darryl Ramm]

So got some brief time with Windows and confirmed Pro Tools is doing what I expected… you see that as a power configuration DISPLAY request. You need a CMD shell with administrator privileges. In the taskbar searchbar type CMD and before hitting return click on "Run as administrator" in the right hand panel that pops up. Then in CMD type the following commands. (don't type "> " that's the CMD prompt that may be different on your system).

> powercfg /requests

If Pro Tools is running on this Mac or has run on it since reboot this will show you that the Pro Tools PROCESS has made a DISPLAY request (often via SetThreadExecutionState API with ES_DISPLAY_REQUIRED).

This is easy to override with the following command. Windows remembers this across Pro Tools restarts and Windows reboots so run it once and your PC should behave like before.

> powercfg /requestsoverride PROCESS ProTools.exe DISPLAY

At any time you can see what requestoverride settings were made by running

> powercfg /requestsoverride

The powercfg documentation explains more if needed.

Again I am a little lost as to why Avid is doing this, seems a bit of a nanny application behavior. This is not locking processes/threads at high priority, or forcing GPU use or anything else that Pro Tools might need that is unusual or deeply technical, it's just stopping the display sleeping/blanking if Windows thinks the computer user is not active. Sure there may be glitches when the display resumes, and problems with people banging on keys on the keyboard to get the display to resume. If users (say folks previewing long sessions) want that they can disable display sleep on their PC.

Veni, vidi, vici

[edit: earlier I had problems getting this working because I was stupidly entering "Pro Tools.exe", with improper space" as the option to powercfg]

[Led]

Thanks for the in depth reply/advice and Efforts Darryl, much appreciated. I figured it was being done by PT. Cubase has always done this, stopped displays sleeping, never understood why, it's just a screen. No big deal, but thanks for the answer..

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Led

Thanks for the in depth reply/advice and Efforts Darryl, much appreciated. I figured it was being done by PT. Cubase has always done this, stopped displays sleeping, never understood why, it's just a screen. No big deal, but thanks for the answer..

If you want you can use the same technique with Cubase, just change the name to what the process name shown when you run powercfg /requests. It should all be using the same mechanism.

This is one thing I'd not jam into the app if I was writing it, or maybe more, if some folks wanted that behavior I'd make it a Pro Tools user preference. I prefer the screen to eventually sleep if there is no activity, and I just set a very very long timeout.