The MacHang.

[Mister Three]

When I click on a large audio or video file in a Finder window my mac hangs for ages spinning a colourful wheel and then it eventually displays the file's preview as requested. This is in column mode.

This takes so long I could have forgotten what I was doing. Up to a minute and thirty nine seconds or so. Does anybody know why and if I can stop it? I know that turning the preview off (clicking the tiny arrow top left of column) will stop it but it's not the best answer. I use this mode often to quickly check through files and some of these are huge video files (4gb). It didn't used to do this in the previous operating system at all.
And not having a simple control panel along the bottom for video/audio files is wrong as well. This new click the spacebar is great but if the control panel was there too we'd have the choice of which to use, for quickly scrubbing through film and the like without having to press the space bar.

I'm on a Mac Pro with 8 cores and system 10.5.2 which I thoroughly love, it's just these little things that used to make it perfect.

 

[varmit]

When I click on a large audio or video file in a Finder window my mac hangs for ages spinning a colourful wheel and then it eventually displays the file's preview as requested. This is in column mode.

This takes so long I could have forgotten what I was doing. Up to a minute and thirty nine seconds or so. Does anybody know why and if I can stop it? I know that turning the preview off (clicking the tiny arrow top left of column) will stop it but it's not the best answer. I use this mode often to quickly check through files and some of these are huge video files (4gb). It didn't used to do this in the previous operating system at all.
And not having a simple control panel along the bottom for video/audio files is wrong as well. This new click the spacebar is great but if the control panel was there too we'd have the choice of which to use, for quickly scrubbing through film and the like without having to press the space bar.

I'm on a Mac Pro with 8 cores and system 10.5.2 which I thoroughly love, it's just these little things that used to make it perfect.

How much RAM do you have in the computer? But even with lots of RAM I'm thinking that previewing 4GB files might be difficult for any computer. Especially since the program has to read in the file or at least a good amount of the file to be able to display what ever it is, and that might take a long time to read it.

What drive setup do you have? I would suggest moving these files off onto a RAID setup to get faster reads. This can be as simple as using two external drives of the same size and have Disk Utility setup them up as a RAID1, but an actual hardware RAID would be even better. http://www.stardom.com.tw/prod.htm Stardom's SOHORaid or SOHOTank using either eSATA or FireWire 800 interfaces would help add speed to the reads.

 

[Mister Three]

thanks for the info

I have 2 gig of ram. More needed I know and was thinking this would be part of the hanging problem but then this happened...
A friend was here the other day and we were working on colour correcting a hd video file. (You may have seen our other frenzied posts
Anyway, that file size is 27 gb but when you click on it up pops it's preview straight away!!!
Why oh why oh why?

 

[misterredman]

Any more information about the video file that causes problems? Format? Etc.

 

[merl1n]

If the Preview hangs (spinning beach ball) it usually means that the video is corrupted. Preview in the Finder uses Quicktime to display the video. If Quicktime can't read the file, you will get a Finder hang.

Instead of using the column view, use the list view and just open the folder containing the video. If it has a generic Quicktime icon on the video file instead of a preview icon, it usually (not always) indicates the file is corrupted. If you select it, and change its name, if it is good, the Finder will update it with a new preview (QuickLook) icon. If it does not, you have a problem with the file.