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Sorry, guys. I'm sure this topic has been addressed, but I'm working on a film with a tight deadline right now and don't have time to search for people with a similar issue. I would appreciate any help you could provide, either in the form of advice or links to other posts that contain the answers I need. Thanks!

Basically, I have to wait almost every time I do *anything* (scroll, select and drag, edit controller data, click on a MIDI note...it could be anything) for the spinning wheel to go away for about 5-7 seconds each time.

I've cleared my Undo History with no appreciable gains in performance. I've also compacted the project (which is pretty much the same thing). Not sure if it has anything to do with the quicktime movie. It's a 1.3 GB file and I'm not sure if that's what's slowing it down. I mean, I'm running an 8 core Mac Pro with 16GB of RAM using Vienna Ensemble Pro for all my VIs except a Polysynth or two. Activity Monitor currently shows DP using 586 MB of memory which doesn't seem like a big deal. It's showing only 1GB free which seems somewhat low, but I'm not running any other programs. VEPro is using 8.8GB and I'm not running any other programs besides Mail (and this web browser). My project is almost all MIDI and I have a ton of tracks on my template, but I'm only using 10-20 per cue which are separated into separate chunks.

Any ideas what could be causing these interruptions? It's almost constant and a real annoyance. And it's really hard to write beautiful music when I'm just super annoyed.

Try closing the movie and seeing that helps. If it does, dumb the movie down to a lower res. Also, how long is the movie? Most film editors chop a film into 20 minutes reels for this very reason. If you have one long film - especially if it is hi-res - you will see a slow down.

I'm editing sound, dialogue, and scoring a 90 minute feature right now that happens to be in one 90 minute reel and don't have that problem, but the QT movie is low res. Even hi-res, however, I did not see that issue.

Are you running your movie off a second drive? That would help. It could also be a OS directory problem or even a cache that needs deleting.

Dude, thank you so much. I moved the movie file to a different hard drive and all is snappy. In retrospect, it was a pretty obvious thing to try. But that's retrospect which is kind of in its nature. I think that makes sense...anyway, back to work!

Cool. Your HD was working too hard.

The problem was gone, but now it's back. Which caches can I check? I'm going insane having to wait every time I want to do something.

Have you tried reducing the movie size? How big (MB or GB) and how long is it?

Not a movie person, but have had the endless spinning ball on many audio-only projects. My recipe is: count to 25 (or any number over 10) then Force Quit. In Disk Utility : Repair Permissions. Restart your router. Restart the Mac. Turn off EVERYTHING that you don't need for the project: Airport, Ethernet, Safari.....EVERYTHING. If this fails to speed things up: Count to 25 etc................!

Mike