Sparkol Help

Topic not covered?

Start a new topic

Movie creation - need to change process

 Been frustrated with movie creation for a long time.  Yesterday made a movie of a 10 min scribe with audio. Said it was going to take 180 mins, but actually took nearly 8 hours. Very painful - but OK - at the end, I clicked save....and guess what?? I had spent 5-6 hours working on a scribe prior to this and the 3-4 gigs I had on my drive was filled with hundreds of temp copies of sparkol saves.....I did not realize and there was insufficient space to save the movie!!

So what was the result? Total waste of a day!!! NO SECOND CHANCE!! PLEASE Sparkol people, if the disc is full, why is there NO alternative save change. Its gone. Sure check for space before hand (OH !! don't suppose Sparkol could do that !!) and why for Pete's sake is saving a SINGLE ONCE ONLY shot. You cant save the same 8 hour production to both youtube AND your disk.....or if your disc is full .......then somewhere else.!!!!


This has happened to me several times - not just because of disc full (mostly because of hundreds of Sparkol temp saves) but because the weird interface you use to disc is a one shot shop! If you are making a 1 or 2 min scribe, fine, but there is an exponential increase in time with large scribes and its really a cause of frustration....

JP,


Have you considered turning the Auto-save feature off? It's available under the gear icon on the project viewer/dashboard window in both the old and new version of the app.


If you just change the default setting to 0 (zero), the program should never auto-save ... which should (I would think) completely eliminate all the temp saved copies.


Jason
(VideoScribe user ... not official support)

Jason
yes thanks this does solve the problem of filling the disc - but its very risky if you have a crash!! (which has happened to me)....I will take responsibility for not checking my disc space before I try to make a movie, but I would really like some changes in the movie creation process...for long scribes...its quite painful.

 

I agree with JP. I would like to see a change also possibly in the form of a render manager or creating the video in the background. Me and my time are creating 2-6 min videos for education purposes and on tight schedules. Having to wait 15-30 mins for the videos to create slows down our production process. While the video is rendering (compiling) I could be working on another one. May be you could add a feature where I can select videos for rendering and it will create them in the order I've selected by asking me first where I would like to save each video or if each video should be published.

 

well I wish it were only 15-30 minutes....my AVERAGE render time is 4-6 hours!! and I can do absolutely nothing while that is happening......

 

Hi.


I have tips and suggestions regarding the posts above. Hopefully some of them will be informative and useful.


I agree that it would be cool to be able to queue scribes to be rendered later or to work while rendering.


 I agree that videoscribe seems to keep a lot of unnecessary temp files (are you talking about the copies of MOV and mp3 files that it saves in the APPdata folder?)  I think it should either: NOT bother saving secret extra copies at all or else include a button in videoscribe to delete cached movies (since there appears to be no use for them and most users never know they are even there.)


 I would recommend keeping closer to 50 GB free if you do any sort of video or graphic work on a regular basis. (However, I don't think this is common knowledge and I don't think most videoscribe users are hardcore graphics people.)  it might be a good idea for Sparkol to add some kind of note to the minimum requirements information.

If you use a PC, then disk cleanup may help you delete gigabytes of temp files. Mac probably has a similar feature. If you are able to manually clear out about 10 more GB or transfer them to a backup drive... it will probably save you a variety of headaches down the road.


More free hard drive space may also increase the rendering speed since videoscribe probably used hard drive space, in addition to RAM, while rendering movies.


 Keeping your zoom in the 50% -200% range will probably also make rendering faster than if your zooms are closer to 1000% or more.


Using properly optimized images may also improve render times.

http://help.videoscribe.co/support/discussions/topics/1000023738



The autosave backup is only one file, it is overwritten with new data each time the autosave is run. So it does not produce multiple temp files.  However, some people disable it just because it is distracting. Just remember to back up your work manually and frequently! :)



-Mike (videoscribe user)




Mike' suggestions are useful....but I rarely have more than a few gigs spare space....
but i do have a disagreement with him regarding temp files. On my last work project, there were literally hundreds of temp files, all sparkol - close to 5 gigs of space in fact in my recycle bin....so I dont understand Mike's statement about files. My past experience on probably 3-4 occasions was that it literally filled my disc with backups (you would think by now I would be aware of this, but once you click the button, there is nothing to be done but wait!)
best

 

Hi JP,

Oh yeah! I think I remember a previous thread about the recycle bin filling up. Lets try to sort this out. It seems like your symptoms may be something more unusual than what other people experience.

 I believe AUTOSAVE (when working correctly)  only makes one file and over-writes it repeatedly.  However, Videsocribe DOES make (seemingly unnecessary) copies of mov, svg and mp3 files in the videoscribedesktop folder that can add up to gigabytes (but they are not related to the autosave backup feature. Videoscribe makes them even if autosave is disabled) I don't think videoscribe normally puts any files in the recycle bin.

1) I went back and researched your previous thread. Are you still using version 1.3.32 of videoscribe? (that could be causing some of your problems with extra files appearing)

In your previous thread you mentioned "450 megs in the recycle bin all from autosave." and "14 duplicate copies of your scribe appearing on the main page" but I don't think you provided details about the number, the names, or file types of the files in the recycle bin, or explained why you thought autosave was responsible for putting them there.

2) What are the file names (or at least the file extensions ) of the temp files that added up to 5 GB in your recycle bin? How many files were there? Did you put them there or did they appear there by themselves? Were they all created on the same day?



Thanks,
Mike

 


Login to post a comment