New Mac... what's important?

[bayswater]

Maybe it's a timeout on a volume that no longer exists. I have that happen now and then. I have a USB backup drive that has no DP files of any sort on it. But when I invoke something that uses a Finder file save/open, etc, if the USB volume has spun down, the application, sometimes DP, will wait for that volume to spin back up before it will proceed. If the USB drive is turned off, it will wait a long time, presumably until it times out. So, if there was some volume present on your system that is no longer there, perhaps DP is asking the system to display them, and timing out.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Maybe it's a timeout on a volume that no longer exists. I have that happen now and then. I have a USB backup drive that has no DP files of any sort on it. But when I invoke something that uses a Finder file save/open, etc, if the USB volume has spun down, the application, sometimes DP, will wait for that volume to spin back up before it will proceed. If the USB drive is turned off, it will wait a long time, presumably until it times out. So, if there was some volume present on your system that is no longer there, perhaps DP is asking the system to display them, and timing out.

I wonder if that is something that can be "cleared" if you're not using the timed out disc any more but the system is still looking for it?

[bayswater]

Maybe it's a timeout on a volume that no longer exists. I have that happen now and then. I have a USB backup drive that has no DP files of any sort on it. But when I invoke something that uses a Finder file save/open, etc, if the USB volume has spun down, the application, sometimes DP, will wait for that volume to spin back up before it will proceed. If the USB drive is turned off, it will wait a long time, presumably until it times out. So, if there was some volume present on your system that is no longer there, perhaps DP is asking the system to display them, and timing out.

I wonder if that is something that can be "cleared" if you're not using the timed out disc any more but the system is still looking for it?

I suppose if you recreate the file or template on a system where the volume does not exist, future reads and writes won't look for it. I did a couple of terminal commands, one that tells disks not to spin down for a long time and one that changes the timeout to something very short. That was some time ago and I don't recall the details, but google probably does. Some third party drives are immune to the commands on spin down.

[RodneySauer]

My old projects still get the spinning ball while saving, the new ones don't. So it may be disk access, or looking for a nonexistent drive, but it's peculiar to (and consistent within) the older projects. And on those projects I tried all kinds of things like putting the projects and the video on different drives from the system, or on the same drive as the system, and nothing made a difference.

During these "spins," the Activity Monitor shows D.P. being pretty hoggy with the processor (up to 25% or so) for the first twenty seconds, then its listing in Activity Monitor turns red with a "not responding" message appended for around ten seconds, and then the spinning ball goes away and all is well again.

If I'm playing back MIDI while saving, there's a fun thing where the notes stop playing about when the "not responding" happens, then as soon as the ball goes away, I get all of the backed-up MIDI notes at once as a really big, loud chord! I got good at turning down the volume on my digital piano before that happened...

Fortunately, I think that with my freshly redesigned templates, it's no longer a thing.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Thanks, Bayswater.

[mikehalloran]

It could be that DP is looking for a drive or volume that no longer exists and creating a new template fixed this.

Activity Monitor, Console and DP's (View) Background Processing are tools that can help figure out what's happening. If you want to chase this problem, that is. For myself, having solved it, I would stop looking.