Hi

. . . . Save Automatically in Video Pro X just dumb . . . .

The only 'dumb' thing about autosave is that it can only save up to 10 backups, on the 11th and subsequent backups, the oldest one of the 10 is overwitten, therefore it is necessary to look at the creation date of the backup file to find the latest.

. . . . the edit screen sits there for an hour, . . .

If it is sitting there taking an hour to backup then there is something odd going on, however we do not know what your PC specification is - see note below.

The biggest project I have made has 7 timelines - total runtime just under 2 hours, with about 1000+ objects in total over the 7 timelines, is 7.5MB in size and takes less than 1 minute to backup.

What is the actual file size of the projects MVP file and how many timelines are in it?

. . . . After it finishes the export and I want to exit, it always asks do you want to save. . . . .

Yes it does, it wants to save the current export settings you used, whether you changed then or not.

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John EB

Hi,

I've got to agree with simmiv on this one, especially about automatic backup saves even if nothing has changed. We should add this to the wish list. The project, for some reason becomes corrupted (corrupt?) and you don't notice it, go for a long lunch, and when you return, all of the backups are of the bad project.

In Xara, if you make a save, the diskette turns grey, can't click on it until a change is made. I didn't check for what happens with the automatic backups, but it would be good to have this feature extended to the automatic backup in VPX - the clock starts ticking from the first change after a previous automatic backup.

Automatic backups can and do take time, especially with several movies, as you pointed out John EB. The backup, like a save, cycles through the movies and then again through the Project folder. One minute is a long time to wait when you're editing, but necessary. However, if it takes one hour, something is wrong, like hard disks that have gone to sleep. @simmiv - check that you don't have a sleeping hard drive that is needed during the automatic backup save.

John CB

I've updated my signature with details of my PC.. What I meant when I said it sits for an hour, simply means that it's idle and if set to autosave every 10 minutes, it diligently autosaves every 10 minutes without any changes or any move of the mouse. As I said I changed the autosave from 10 minutes to 60 minutes as it was always kicking in every 10 minutes, locked the UI while autosaving. The time it takes to autosave depended on if I was saving to my NAS drive, HDD or SSD. i.e. from one to two minutes to seconds. Now I just use the SSD as it only takes a few seconds. It does vary depending on the amount of change. I've also noticed at times that when I do a save, then export, another save and exit. Upon opening the file again it offers a backup file! I usually decline that as it must be older than the original. Thus I'm thinking the autosave is pretty basic. Take for instance office, it autosaves behind the scenes, doesn't lock up the UI and is seamless. Yes, I know it's only a word processor, but it seems to do that even if you copy/paste large images into the document.

@simmiv

Hi

Thanks for the clarification.

If I am working for a long session on a project I frequently (approx every 20 - 30 mins) use 'Save as' adding a version number to the end of is name ofthe project . This way if the backups do corrupt I have a previous version I can go back to.

There is a significant difference between the ways MEP and Word store data. MEP uses a 'simple' database ie one that has no 'transaction logging' function which allows changes while the database is otherwise occupied with a task eg backing up.

In principle MEp uses the database as follows:

• The project MVP file is the data that is imported into the database when you open the project.
  For a new project the database is 'empty' to start with.
• Every change you make during editing is written to the database immediately behind the scenes
• When an autosave is in progress the database data is read and written to the backup file, this can takes seconds to a minute or two, it is at this point that the data must not be changed, hence the locking of the UI.
• When you save a project the database data is read and written to the project file (MVP)

HTH

John EB

I'm also w simmiv on this.

Any autosave that actually overwrites a meaningful previous autosave when nothing saveworthy has occurred since that last save is... well... brain-dead. Within ten cycles of doing nothing (e.g. leave your terminal for lunch), you will only have 1 meaningful autosave.

Because of this silliness, I turn off autosave and manually save often (Using exactly John EB's scheme), rather than wait for the autosave to interrupt me and eventually give me back control of my machine (sometimes minutes. even when saving to SSD). It makes the regular crashes a bit more irritating to recover from, but we work around it...

indefensibly bad programming choice,

--mindsong

(edit to clarify)

@mindsong

. . . . indefensibly bad programming choice, . . . .

Where do you draw the line of how many autosave backups there should be saved before recycling them?

What is not good is the fact that autosaves occur when there has been no activity for more than the autosave time.

John EB