For the sake of argument, we’ll presume you have 2-10 gigs free space on the scratch drive.
In the Actions palette, does it make a difference if you set playback options to Accelerated?
Peace,
Tony
I have 25 gig on my scratch drive. Wher do you set playback options?The history palete has no effect.
In the Actions Palette, there’s a little triangle in the upper right hand corner of the tab. Clicking that brings up a flyout menu. Click on your action, then click the triangle and choose Playback options.
Peace,
Tony
Jim:
What other applications besides Photoshop CS (if any) are open when you’re experiencing these symptoms?
Are the image characteristics the same (from one image to the next), e.g., always Background-only, 8"x10", 300 ppi (or whatever)?
In your Preferences, what setting did you specify for PS’s RAM %?
You didn’t mention which version of Windows: 2000? XP? or ???
Are you playing your actions in batch or one image at a time? [If your action has no dialogs to answer, Batch might be an option for improved throughput.]
~Danny~
All actions are set to accelerate. Their are no other apps running. Images are always 8×10 at 300ppi. My ram is set for 75 per cent(699mg)
The OS is XP PRO. These action are played on 1 image at a time
I run actions all day long, in batch and individually. A two minute action *is* a long time, but let’s clarify what’s happening in the action. Maybe there’s a different way to do it, or the order of the steps.
I can tell you that when I run actions that are not batched, it’s the wierdest thing – I can press my hot key and boom, crop the right edge by 10 pixels in the blink of an eye. I press another hotkey and you see the status bar crawling along to recalculate the image before it lops off 10 pixels from the other side. So I know what you’re saying.
I haven’t tried it, and from what I’ve read it *shouldn’t* help, but I have often wondered if enabling and/or increasing the image cache setting would speed it up. Here, I’m talking about Edit|Preferences|Memory and Image Cache.
Reading the helpfile about this doesn’t seem like it would help. But the fact that Action 1 decreases the canvas size by 10 pixels on the right, in the blink of an eye, and Action 2 decreases the canvas size by 10 pixels on the LEFT, yet takes forever, makes me wonder if PS has to "recalculate" the image size in order to perform that second operation.
That’s a long winded way to say, enabling the Image Cache or increasing the number of histogram levels may be worth trying, but it’s just a guess at this point.
In terms of productivity, you may be better off re-thinking how you can perform *some* steps with actions manually, and then run other operations on them in batch. Let me briefly explain in case it may help…
We normally think very linearly – do these five steps in sequence to the images. Steps 1 and 2 require some user intervention or "artists eye", but the rest are pretty straighforward. You can batch images that have these types of steps by running steps 1 and 2 on them with manual actions, and then save them (as PSD’s). Then you can run a batch action for steps 3 through 5 on them.
Maybe this isn’t possible with the type of editing your doing, or maybe there aren’t enough images to warrant a batch operation, but I offer it up for consideration.
Peace,
Tony
Have you installed the Multi Processor Support plugin?
Fred Nirque "Photoshop CS MPSupport plugin update now available" 8/23/04 9:53pm </cgi-bin/webx?13/16>
Try winding the RAM allocation back – start at 50% and see if that helps. If it does, increase the allocation until you get the slowdown again, then back off a bit from there.
Fred.
Could you do a file copy on the SCSI drives…to see the speed? no slower device has been added to the SCSI controller?
Thanks for all of your reply s. I have tried all of your suggestions. On a hunch that my graphics card might be "broke" I reinstalled my original Matrox 450. My actions run just as fast or faster than my ATI GL8800???? My next move is to email ATI and see what they say. Thanks again for all your help.
JIM
Well Jim, that’s interesting. In fact, I have to hand it to your for trying that – I wouldn’t have thought of it.
You know, I’m not sure of the probity of the following in your case, but often times when folks have video trouble, we recommend that they go into the control panel and launch the System applet. From there, find Video Hardware Acceleration and set it to NONE. If their problem goes away, then it is due to a buggy vid driver. You see, the latest drivers aren’t always the best, and sometimes, you have roll back a version of Vid drivers from the Mfr.
Might be interesting to see what happens if you put your ATI back in and tried the same experiment. That way, if it were a driver, then it may be a simple matter of rolling back a version of vid driver.
Peace,
Tony
