Movie Maker

[darbyshire]

on the network where i work movie maker is a problem.

when a a couple of users are using Movie Maker it runs as it should but when a whole class start using Movie Maker is just freezes.

Anyone come across this problem?

[ICT_GUY]

Working on files from their my documents folder held on the server? Big Video files? Can you see where I am going here? have a look at your network load on your server to see if its getting swamped.

We are looking at doing some DV stuff here, and I think I am going to be ending up making a scratch partition just for video editing. Though this is not without problems.

[dhicks]

when a a couple of users are using Movie Maker it runs as it should but when a whole class start using Movie Maker is just freezes.

Are the users all accessing large video files from a single networked file area? That would reduce performance - either your file server can't cope or the network between the client machines and the server can't.

--
David Hicks

[DMcCoy]

Symantec AV on the server is also a possibility, had that issue with 10. something.

[dhicks]

We are looking at doing some DV stuff here, and I think I am going to be ending up making a scratch partition just for video editing.

Us too - I'm planning to have each PC share a second harddrive out as a network-available block device and have a server aggregate all of those blocks into some kind of shared storage. I'm not sure how well this is going to work, but it's about the only affordable solution I can come up with. Any advice as to how I get a harddrive shared out as a block device under Windows much appreciated!

--
David Hicks

[darbyshire]

something i didnt add.

we also have serif movieplus running on our network and this problem isnt happening when the students all use this at one time.

its bit confusing

[dhicks]

we also have serif movieplus running on our network and this problem isnt happening when the students all use this at one time.

Are the users all accessing large video files from a single networked file area?

--
David Hicks

[darbyshire]

yes we have a shared area where all the videos are which they are using them for a project and it doesnt crash out while using serif movie plus.

[dhicks]

yes we have a shared area where all the videos are which they are using them for a project and it doesnt crash out while using serif movie plus.

The things to check would be the disk access on your server and the data throughput of the switch(es) between the server and the client machines. It could be that Serif Movie Plus works in a different way to Movie Maker - I know Adobe Premier made good use of disk space, letting you edit on a special small "preview" clip that didn't take up as much disk space/bandwidth, only using the original footage to render the final video. Movie Maker might be doing a rather unsophisticated just-read-the-data-from-the-harddrive kind of arrangement.

If you have a Windows server then there's a performance metre built right in, under the System Tools section of the Start menu. That'll tell you what your disk and processor are doing. Is your server itself hanging, needing a reboot, or is the problem just that the clients are not responding?

If you have a managed switch then you can log in to that to see what network traffic is like, if you have an unmanaged switch then there's a good chance it's not up to the task, bandwidth-wise, anyway!

With the above said, I've found Movie Maker to be thoroughly wobbly just on my local machine, just trying to edit some camcorder footage - I bought myself Premier Elements in the end!

--
David Hicks

[darbyshire]

It isnt the server itself. It is the client machine when a large amount of students are simultaneous doing the same thing.

[pallen]

At what point do they freeze? Are you having all clients trying to cache the movie files when they are trying to import files? Or is it when they trying to edit the files or trying to output them?

There is a few settings you can change in Movie maker which change the quality of the file. I know it sounds fairly basic, but could it be that the users are trying to use the best quality settings and your network cant cope?

[dhicks]

It isnt the server itself. It is the client machine when a large amount of students are simultaneous doing the same thing.

Okay, so there must be some resource that all client machines are trying to use simultaneously that's causing the problem. If it's not the harddisk / network bandwidth, is there some kind of file/other resource locking going on, either on the server the video files are being served from or on another server? Is the video file being edited being locked by the first person to open it, perhaps? Are the client machines running any kind of services that swap data round your network (children maybe installed file-sharing clients?).

--
David Hicks