35MB is the project file only. The proxies are in the 10GB range and on a separate disk. I'll try the sound hint now.

Hi

Try restarting (not shutdown) the computer - Windows start, Power , Restart.

We need more information:

1. Computer specification - processor make/model, graphics card or chipset, RAM, hard drives size and free space?         
2. Windows version and is it up to date?         
3. Software version number - see under Help, About . . .
4. Format and resolution of the video on the timeline
5. A screen shot of the timeline may help.  

. . . . on a separate disk . . . .

is this an internal hard drive or an external drive attached through USB or network?

John EB

1. AMD FX 8350 (8 core), 16GB RAM, System drive 256GB SSD - about 60GB free, data drive SATA3 HDD 2TB Western Digital (type I don't recall right now) - about 1TB free, NVidia Geforce 6800 GTX 4GB (Asus Direct CUII)
2. Windows 10 64bit english, with latest patches.
3. MEPP version I need to look up later, but I got an semi-automatic update last week.
4. 1920x1080p25
5. Will be provided when back at work desk. :)

The data drive is internal. I was looking at task manager performance screen and later the resource monitor - the HDD was at no time spiking, CPU sometimes during cursor dragging.

The system was restarted this morning, and this did not improve performance. What I find is that performance is much closer to tolerable if there is no image overlay on the current scene.The images I use have dimensions 1920x1080 or 2048x1536, the second ones are scaled to scene needs.

Also, There was no problem editing with this configuration in the beginning. Last week I once had an autosave error - the modal save dialog was hanging at 99 (95?)% and I had to force close the application. The save was corrupted and I had to start from an earlier stage. That was when I realized that undo's take so long and the project file is gigantic. Both movies in this project are composed in multicam sync mode, then received image overlays, image stabilization, manual motion tracking, audio cleaning. The first movie in this project BTW was damaged when I by mistake deleted some proxy files - the master audio track was gone and I had to manually recreate the sequence.

If 35MB for the project file sounds beyond plausible, would it make sense to send it in for inspection?

35MB is quite large for the project file but it sounds like you have a quite complex movie. It is possible the project file has become corrupted so you could look at earlier backups and see if there had been a sudden jump in file size at any point. You could also try copying and pasting the entire timeline ("Select all") into a new project and see if that works better.

Hi

. . . . I had to force close the application. The save was corrupted and I had to start from an earlier stage. That was when I realized that undo's take so long and the project file is gigantic . . . .

This has more than likely corrupted the MEPP ini file

Try resetting the program to default settings - File, Settings, Reset . . .

If there are still issues then the ini file may be corrupted in which case locate the file - it should be in

C:\Users\AccountName\AppData\Roaming\MAGIX\Videodeluxe23_premium

rename this file and then start MEPP, this will create a new ini file, however you will lose any customisations you have made.

Load the latest backup file that is of reasonable size ie one that was created before the crash if one is available.

HTH

John EB

Hi,

You didn't happen to mute the object or the track, did you? Does the audio for the clip work ok in a new project?

In VPX, I too find the same problem with long delay for an undo on projects with many elements. Combined with this is another problem. I have to click twice for almost everything, from selecting an object to moving one, to applying an effect, to undoing something. Have you encountered this?

John CB

Hi,

browj2, the double clicking need did not appear here, although there can be a kind of unresponsiveness on the app just before the autosave-dialog appears.The track was not muted, just all the audio objects on the track were gone.

johnebaker, I'll try to follow your instructions right after breakfast.But there is no latest backup left that is not in this filesize range.

@johnebaker, I had restarted the PC today, and the settings were restored to default, then adjusted as needed. It did not make a difference.

What I found instead, was a huge performance difference in when dragging the timeline cursor while showing the Import Tab, compared to when showing the Effects tab. It might be caused by keeping the timeline cursor in sync between these two windows. This was not a problem before the last update - but as my project file has grown at the same period, this might not be the root cause.

Another thing to mention is that I am editing on a 4K screen.

I just finalized my second movie in that project, the project file size is now 45MB. My last undo action took about a minute to complete.

I had restarted the PC today, and the settings were restored to default, then adjusted as needed. It did not make a difference.

Did you try you try deleting the .ini file as John EB suggested?

Did you try the "use original audio" option I suggested?

Did you try copy and pasting all the timeline objects into a new project as I suggested?

You need to confirm you are trying our all our suggestions or we are just wasting time here!

Something is definitely corrupted there and I have seen this sort of behaviour before, concurrent with a sudden increase in the project file size.

The 4K screen will put extra load on the preview smoothness but only if you are viewing the monitor window at greater than 1/2 Full HD size - in your case more than 1/8 full screen. It is not relevant to your problem as far as I can see. 

And, does the audio file work in a new project?

😳 Seems I forgot to mention that I took a look at the audio in the Magix Music editor and found that there is a gap in the stream. As I explained in another thread, the recorded material used left stereo channel for the internal camera mic and right channel for RF microphone input. That one was supposed to have the better signal but it has a huge gap in it, the signal must have been lost there. The actual problem is now that there is no way to see this in MEPP without actually splitting the stereo first into two separate mono tracks, as the audio graph is combined stereo and there is no known way to configure what to see there.

At the begin of this project I tried to have the audio channels separated using ffmpeg, but importing them to MEPP failed-they had double the length of the video stream.😞

I will try now to copy/paste the timeline.

Hi

. . . . At the begin of this project I tried to have the audio channels separated using ffmpeg, but importing them to MEPP failed-they had double the length of the video stream. . . .

What export settings did you use in ffmpeg?

MEP works best with 48kHz sample rate and at least 128 kbs - 192 kbs is better - constant bitrate.

John EB

Hi, John,

The extracted audio files were AC3, 48kHz, 96kb/s. I have seen this symptom of audio vs video length doubling with Blender because it was incapable of handling interlaced video material. I did not expect that in MEPP, too.

I tried to copy the timeline into another instance of MEPP (that is, I started two instances). Select all, CRTL-C (or from Edit->Copy objects), causes the application to be unresponsive for about two minutes, and then pasting to the second instance fails with "Empty clipboard".

So I learned today that MEPP does not use the windows clipboard. Pasting into the same instance (same project, new movie) does work. Also it does not work to copy in one project, then close, open the other, then paste.

I now succeeded by creating a new project, then opening the existing project, and on the dialog I choose to import the other project movies. After saving that, the project file size was again 45MB, and the unresponsiveness problem still exists (actually feels worse than before). It totally disappears when switching from Effects tab to any other tab. There must be a problem with the effects timeline. It does not make a difference if I move the cursor on the main timeline or the effects timeline.

As asked for above, here are screenshots of the timelines:

Hi

Don't quite follow procedure in your last post. I would have copy and pasted the timeline objects into a new Movie tab and then used Export Movie, from the dropdown arrow to the right of the movie tabs in your problem project, after selecting the "new movie" tab. This saves the movie as a .MVD file. Then open a new project and then use Import Movie from the same menu next to the movie tabs, and select the .MVD you exported, from the file window.

that might work, too. But opening that other project from a new one was providing that import feature, too. BTW copy pasting the movie within the same project into a fresh tab I tried first, too, and this caused an almost freeze of the application. I waited for more than 5 minutes for completion. BTW, sad that MEPP does not support multithread processing and the UI thread is always blocked when something happens.

@Hackemesser

Forgive me if I've lost the plot in this multi-issue thread, but FWIW, if you are still having issues with audio ....

I've had issues in the past when MEP 2016 and 2017 suddenly lost sound half way through a project. I was doing multi-cam work at the time, but I don't think that was critical to the problem. The cause I believe was that I had used the track stretch mouse tool to adjust the sound track to a slightly different length to match the video. I assume that in some way (I can't pretend to understand the details since I have no idea how MEP works internally) the strict timings of audio samples required at the failure point fell out of the tolerances allowed by MEP, and resulted in silence thereafter.

The solution was simple. Load the project, export the complete (stretched/squashed) sound track as WAV, import into Audacity, immediately export it as WAV, put that new WAV back in to replace the stretched version - and everything was happy after that.

Regards - Mike -