MEP 2015 Plus; unexpected file size change in .MVPs

Recycler wrote on 1/7/2015, 3:04 PM

Has anyone else experienced this oddity? (in MEP 2015 Plus)

A bit of necessary background .... I develop each project in its own self-contained folder on the data drive inside my PC. When I decide all is done, I move the folder as is, lock stock and barrel, to a NAS archive.

I decided to archive two projects today from PC to NAS. With the Magix program closed, before actually moving the files to the NAS,  I did some minor, very minor, re-arrangements of the sub-folders containing source files. To put it another way, the paths stored inside the MVP were not completely accurate before I moved everything to NAS.

Once that had been done, I changed my mind (as one does), and decided I needed to pull each project back to the PC drive and render a different MP4 output. (This work is HD, so I judge it less risky to move all files back to the local drive before running MEP.)

Because as explained above the source path pointers in the MVP were not entirely correct, in each case I needed to use Magix's "folder" facility to find the source files again. Absolutely no problem, and the MP4s rendered fine.

Then I noticed something very odd. The .MVP files originally on the NAS archive were around 1 MB;  after their journey back to the PC, some minor changes to source file path names, and a rendering to MP4, and resaving, they were nearly 20 MB!  (Specifically, Project1 began at 724 KB and bloated to 18,163 KB, and Project2 grew from 1,521 KB to 20,170 KB)

Looking at the MVPs in NotePad++, the bloated files are clearly stuffed with a lot of NULs, but I'm not competent to comment much further than that.  Any thoughts, please?

- Mike -

Comments

terrypin wrote on 1/8/2015, 9:32 AM

Hi,

I have neither MEP 2015 nor an NAS drive, but FWIW I couldn't reproduce your issue using MEP 2014 and my 2 TB external HD instead. The steps were as follows:

1. Assembled a small project. All its resources were within the folder C:\Docs\My Videos\PROJECTS\Test Project. The original resultant MVP was 230 KB.

2. Closed MEP, added a couple of new subfolders and arbitrarily moved some of the files into them. I left the MVP itself in its original location. The folder looked like this:

3. Moved the folder's contents to E:\TEMP. Then moved them back! (Did I interpret your description correctly? Apart from your temporary storage being on an NAS drive, is that what you did? No operations on the files while they were there? Did you notice any size change immediately upon returning them to your main HD?)

4. Opened the the MVP and re-located the files the program could no longer find.

5. Rendered an MP4.

6. Re-saved the MVP - which was still 230 KB.

Last changed by terrypin on 1/8/2015, 10:01 AM, changed a total of 3 times.

Terry, East Grinstead, UK. PC: i7 6700K, 4.0 GHz, 32GB with Win 10 pro. Used many earlier versions of MEPP, currently mainly MEPP 2016 & 2017 (Using scores of macro scripts to add functionality, tailored to these versions.)

Recycler wrote on 1/9/2015, 6:06 AM

Hello Terry:

Thank you very much for doing that experiment. The answers to your questions raised in para 3 are

Did I interpret your description correctly? Yes!
Apart from your temporary storage being on an NAS drive, is that what you did? Yes
No operations on the files while they were there? No
Did you notice any size change immediately upon returning them to your main HD? I'm afraid I didn't check, even on the second project....

Once I've got the present job out of the door I'll create a smaller, manageable test scenario like you did, and repeat the process.

Thanks again  - Mike -