If you delete a post, how do you expect a reply?
I saw that you specifically had responded to several other posts that were made around the same time / after mine and so assumed I was being left on read. "Resolume will load the last composition you used on startup" was the only clarification I needed. The 'new set' workaround I will go with for now, even if loading times remain the same. At least it should speed up that initial load and spare me the splash screen obstruction.
Yeah, the layouts realization occurred to me shortly after I posted. Da doy. Although, wondering, does it sometimes re-size the panels? I have made layout settings which minimize the width of FX, Sources, Files (for ex), but then I will later load up the layout and while things are in the position they should be, I have to shrink size again to maximize screen real estate. Haven't sat down to troubleshoot that one specifically, and maybe it changes if there are changes to screen resolution in Windows inbetween Resolume sessions (??), but a curious behaviour I have run into a time or two...
Right now I am working on paring down my mega-set as much as I know how to lessen the load time. One obvious culprit would be that I had a couple of decks (containing hundreds of clips) duplicated. Lacking a full understanding of the computational processes / 'resource consumption' ways of the software, it didn't occur to me that this would necessarily cause issues. I figured that the clips would 'point' to video files and wouldn't be eating up resources if I had them duplicated / taking up many cells, but I guess not? I don't know, and if there's a dedicated breakdown I skipped over in the manual, my bad. But??? Maybe this is all total noob behaviour, but relatively speaking, I *am* new to the software, so yeah...
Anyway, deleting duplicate decks dropped my set from a whopping 144MB (a file size I hadn't even really looked at, but which, when compared to earlier projects I had which were like 40kb, was an obviously *enormous* size) to around 60MB. But this still seems quite hefty...
I have removed all excess Columns from each deck. I have been sorting out my clip library in such a way that each layer is its own dedicated collection of clips, but sometimes there are big disparities in numbers of clips. So, one row might have 70 clips / columns for 'BACKGROUND' and another layer uses 10 clips / columns for 'DANCERS' (for ex). Does the creation of all those additional (unused) cells bog things down significantly? The way I work it has been 'making sense' to lay things out like that, but maybe I need to cram things in differently so that Column / Cell count is lower overall??
I haven't counted the *exact* number of video files I use in the set, but it's at least a couple hundred. Do the particulars of each video (length, resolution, etc...) affect load time? I have many clips which are just microloops of a given segment of a longer / larger video file, but would cropping them all down and re-importing them even make a difference? I would rather not do this (future projects will be much tidier and won't have so much excess footage, but this first one is messy due to me learning my way around).
In addition to a 'CLIPS' deck which holds all my video files (the deck I mentioned I had duplicates of), I have 5 'FX BANK' decks which range from 35-50ish columns used per. Each column containing usually 3 to 5 clip containing layers (as well as the remaining empty near-40 layers which are there because I use them for sorting CLIP collections). These individual Effect Clips can be minimal (1 or 2 or 0 effects) to heavily stacked chains of like 20+ FX. I was trying to keep them all in the same deck so I could switch to the deck, copy a column, then return to different deck to actually build / develop specific scenes, but deck switching with all that going on ground to a halt, so I split it up into multiples.
I saved a copy of the set without *any* CLIPS deck just to see how big the project would be with the FX BANK decks alone, and it dropped from 60MB to 19MB... So it seems my FX chains are still quite intense, but not as all-consuming as the CLIPS deck.
Having taken these steps and launched the newly trimmed / cleaned up set (with one CLIPS deck included), load time now only takes me about 3 and a half minutes, which is an improvement, but could still be brought down I'm sure.
As for sharing the set (I mean 'composition'.. I come from Ableton .als land), I'd be happy to e-mail y'all (and any non-staff reading this as well) so you can get a better idea of what I'm going for. If you want to keep the thread going on the forum here, cool, but if my novel-length post is a bit much, we can continue the conversation via email too. I could send *just* the Avenue project (sans video files), but ultimately my system is meant to work along with Ableton Live, and understanding how the two go together would help to explain why I am doing things the way I am doing them, as well as potentially provoke you to show me a better way to achieve tasks I'm currently stuck on. I understand this isn't an Ableton-centric forum, but the two programs together work beautifully and complement each other quite effectively when running smoothly, and I'm sure there are other folk here who would benefit from the intergenereactive compositional approach I am devising!
In summation,
if I do not receive a response within 3-5 minutes of posting this, I will assume that you personally hate me and are too busy telling all your cool VJ friends what an obtuse dork I am to help me solve these issues.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
