Windows Movie maker taking too long to save project

[Karanth]

Windows Movie maker taking >10hrs to save a video of 45 minutes. Cannot
figure out the problem. Any help

 

[- Bobb -]

Windows Movie maker taking >10hrs to save a video of 45 minutes. Cannot
figure out the problem. Any help

I went thru similar a while ago.
You have more patience than I did.
I think consensus here was that WMM was not designed to handle that much
data.
I think for 9.95 hours of your 10 hours it was in never, neverland.
( I had no disk activity nor CPU time being used while mine was hanging.)

After losing all of my work a few times, what I do now is set to autosave
every X minutes, and even then while saving mine times out - I have to let
it sit. OR kill process, reopen a while later and finds "unfinished"
program and rebuilds.
I DO like the process vs. store-bought apps - when it works, but wouldn't
bet any money on it working 100% on any given day.

I know no help - just wanted you to know " not your Pc/config" it is the
app.

 

[Twayne]

Windows Movie maker taking >10hrs to save a video of 45 minutes.
Cannot figure out the problem. Any help

You have no problem. Video rendering is a cpu/ram intensive activity
and can take a long time, depending on your cpu speed, disk drive/s rpm,
amount of ram installed, amount of ram availalbe for it to use, number
of physical hard drives it can be allowed to use, pagefile size &
location, and a host of other things. In addition, WMM is a tad slower
anyway because it's an older implementation of the rendering engines.
It also depends on what else is running on the machine and how much
of available ram it's allowed to use, etc.. For video work you often
want to use a different hardware profile with as few things running as
possible and don't use other programs at the same time. That's why
rendering is almost always left to be done overnight. It's a good
little app, but "basic" in nature; few bells & whistles.

 

[Twayne]

I went thru similar a while ago.
You have more patience than I did.
I think consensus here was that WMM was not designed to handle that
much data.
I think for 9.95 hours of your 10 hours it was in never, neverland.
( I had no disk activity nor CPU time being used while mine was
hanging.)

It does look that way when it's reading/writing and managing hte
pagefile or offputting a lot of the activity to the graphics card for
manipulation, whose cpu you don't get to see as a rule, plus a few other
things I've probably forgotten. Of course, it could have been hung
too<g>. Video rendering is one of the most machine intensive processes
you can run on a computer; it involves just about every resource the
computer has and still wants more. You have to keep in mind that it's
writing many megs large temporary files during the renders.
Another important thing a lot of people miss is that you often have
to do a defrag between renders. Rendering really fragments a hard drive
after as few as one rendering operation if it was more than say ten
minutes of video. Each successive render will get slower than the last
one due to the fragmentation of the drive. For near an hour and up to
two hours, the most I do, I have to defrag between each rendering
session. Fortunately I use a second disk drive for those operations so
it doesn't slow down other things on the system drive. You fragment the
system drive by just turning the stupid computer on, so it's fairly
important to offload as much of the rendering as possible toanother
drive. Preferably a second physical hard drive, but even just a
partitioned drive helps some.
I only use WMM for quickie stuff; for the bigger stuff I use Ulead's
apps. It takes a pretty competent machine to handle video rendering.

 

[- Bobb -]

You have no problem. Video rendering is a cpu/ram intensive activity
and can take a long time, depending on your cpu speed, disk drive/s rpm,
amount of ram installed, amount of ram availalbe for it to use, number
of physical hard drives it can be allowed to use, pagefile size &
location, and a host of other things. In addition, WMM is a tad slower
anyway because it's an older implementation of the rendering engines.
It also depends on what else is running on the machine and how much of
available ram it's allowed to use, etc.. For video work you often want
to use a different hardware profile with as few things running as
possible and don't use other programs at the same time. That's why
rendering is almost always left to be done overnight. It's a good
little app, but "basic" in nature; few bells & whistles.

In my earlier reply, when mine hung it I had checked Task mgr - and had no
high percent CPU use - I saw NO disk IO, etc. I would logoff/shutdown -
get a popup - to " Stop Task ?" I answered yes. Log back in. Reopen WMM -
it announced - found project ( that it abandoned) - "fixed it " and soon
video WOULD compile and shortly thereafter would " make progress and use
could see percentage change on screen.
My take on it was - WMM never used more than 300k of memory in spite of
large mem available etc. I think WMM was not written to handle large jobs
and once a large project started it "lost its place". I found itVERY
frustrating as I DO like the interface and I didn't like the store-bought
apps I bought.

 

[Paul]

I know this is an old thread, and perhaps I missed a more recent one
that addresses this issue. I apologize if I'm jumping in in the wrong
place.

Has anyone ever figured out a work around this problem?

I have a video that's under 4 minutes long, and WMM indicates it would
be a total of about 1.3 MB. When I try to save it to my computer, it
keeps generating higher and higher estimated times it will finish. I
stopped it at 800 minutes, as there was no indication that it would stop
any time soon.

I tried restarting the program, as well as rebooting, but there's no
change.

Anyone have a clue how to troubleshoot this thing?

Would you, perhaps, have loaded the same Project file, but
changed a movie clip the Project was using ? Perhaps the
new movie clip substituted, doesn't have a compatible
CODEC type ?

Please review the whole process for making the movie.

Did you start with a brand new Project, then drop a clip
into the timeline, then try to save/publish/burn after
that ? Or have you done something else ?

If you use the GSpot program, what does it say about
the movie type of the movie clip you're using in the
movie ?

http://gspot.headbands.com/v26x/GSpot270a.zip (22 Feb 2007)

Paul