Enormous project file size

[JZilla]

Hey folks. I've been having an issue for quite a while, thought I should finally look into it. For the last few years I've been running a very large template for scoring, with DP running on my MacPro master computer and all the VIs hosted in VE Pro, split between my Mac and a slave PC. My template has an overly complicated system of aux busses funnelling VI returns into stems busses and then into input-monitored audio tracks for printing. There's also always a QT video file, a handful of audio tracks, and some aux sends for FX, but other than that, not really any actual data saved within the file.

The problem is that my DP project files (the .dpdoc files themselves) have been getting extremely large over the last few years. Often they're in the 250 MB range, but the movie I've just finished has the projects files at 500+ MB, which seems a little weird. The autosaves are the same, so I've set it to only keep the last two so my hard drive space doesn't completely disappear. Another thing, which I'm sure is related, is that saving and autosaving takes a really long time, often 30-40 seconds, although I guess that makes sense if it's writing 500 MB each time.

I'm not sure if this is just to be expected as a thing that DP does, or if I've got something set weird. Maybe something to do with the Undo History? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[JZilla]

...and now that I read more about the Undo History in the manual, it looks like that's my best place to start.

[OLB]

Sounds like you haven’t decoupled your VEP instances. Now DP saves all the VEP data in your .dpdoc file. When you decouple VEP you have to save the VEP meta frames locally on your slave. You have to remember to save this regularly but the difference in file size is huge.

Hope this helps!
Lennert

[JZilla]

Hey Lennert, thanks for the suggestion. I've been resistant to using the decouple feature, thinking that not have all the information saved within the DP project might come back to haunt me when recalling projects, but it sounds like it's worth another look. I tend to have a fairly static orchestral palette that doesn't change much from film to film, then a couple of instances that change from cue to cue (synths, additional instruments), maybe I decouple the orchestra and save the others. I'll give it a shot.

Thanks!