Full startup volume

[slowtiger]

I haven't run into this before with TVP, amazingly, but now it happened: during a big clean-up operation (merging all layers at once) TVP informed me after one hour and 83% done that the startup volume was full. I had to kill the program and restart my Mac to be able to continue. (The temp files were cleanly gone after the reboot.)

Is there a way to tell TVP to use a different volume for its temp files? Would be nice.

[Hervé]

Is there a way to tell TVP to use a different volume for its temp files? Would be nice.

Yes: Edit-> Preferences -> General -> Temp Directory and restart TVP

[slowtiger]

Hm, this was already set to a volume with lots of free space...

Here are the numbers:
Saved file size 8 GB.
RAM 1,5 GB
Free space on startup volume 4 GB
Free space on dedicated temp volume 35 GB

The error message explicitly said "start volume".

[ematecki]

While this is "impossible", can you please check from time to time when working which of your volumes gets filled ?

Eric M.

[slowtiger]

I'll try.

[slowtiger]

OK, I fought two more days with this file (and finally won!). To TVPs credit I must say that it never crashed, and it also didn't do harm to the files even when I had to stop it in mid-operation.

The setup was like this:
Startup disk free 2,95 GB
Temp disk free 35,5 GB
File size at beginning 8 GB

I startet some layer merging (but this time not all at once) and the temp disk got full, as expected. With the changes, the file blew up to 15,4 GB on disk. I took some notes:

Code: Select all

finished:   free:
39%         8,3 GB
44%         6,8 GB
56%         5,1 GB
69%         3,6 GB
83%         1,2 GB
89%         21 MB

At this moment I had to cancel the operation. The startup disk remained at its default free value. I noticed that even after saving the file the temp disk didn't free some of the memory taken by the temp file.

On the other machine (identical setup) I was lucky to have some free 400 GB on one disk, so that's where I treated the file successfully today. This time I avoided the mistakes I made before, mainly to flatten the file to only one layer because this blew up the file a lot! I'm now happy with a HDTV file of 8 GB (3200 frames). Rendered to TIFF I expect this to be 22 GB in size.

Does this correspond with your own experience with bigger files?

One thing I never noticed before was that space on the temp disk isn't released before quitting TVP (which I did sometimes). I wonder if there is a better solution possible there, like having a "zap oldest undo levels" menu function.

Edit:
Using another external drive now as the temp volume I noticed that even quitting TVP doesn't release space! I have to reboot to get my free disk space back, which is Not a Good Thing.