Editing performance - slow response to all mouse actions?

FotoMagico
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I’m using FotoMagico 3.7.6 on OS X 10.6.7, in a healthy desktop machine: 6GB RAM, 2 x dual-core 2.66 Xeon cpus. NVidia GeForce 7300, Apple Cinema Display.

FotoMagico is rather painfully slow in responding to all mouse moves. Dragging an image on the Stage is very difficult because the image lags behind the mouse, so by the time the little green alignment guides come on to show center or edge alignment – the image is already past that point.

Similarly there is a huge lag changing images on the stage. If I am looking at an image with NO pan and zoom, and click to one that HAS pan and zoom, it takes three full seconds (“thousand-and-one, thousand-and-two, thousand-and-three”) to display the new image. First it draws it in a single pane, then it redraws in the two panes.

Then if I click back to an image that does NOT have pan and zoom, it takes another three full seconds to display that – first about a second-plus to display the new image in two panes, then a second later, it zooms the left-hand image up to fill the stage.

I have Menumeters showing CPU activity, and during this display lag, FotoMagico is using less than one of the four cores worth of cycles, and about half of that is shown in red, indicating system time rather than application time. For what that’s worth.

It might be relevant that these images are full-res digital camera images, 12mpx, 5-8MB files. But still.

Also relevant: I know I’m back-level, I tried 3.8.1 and it was slower if anything, and crashed, so I went back to 3.7.6.

Any performance advice appreciated…

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I should add, that the mouse response seems equally draggy in a small show of 10 images, and in a large one of 50 images. It doesn’t seem to matter. I don’t think it’s memory constrained because according to the Activity Monitor, FotoMagico is only using 460MB of real memory and the system has over 3GB free.

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Further tech info: I see in the Activity Monitor that FotoMagico is only a 32-bit app, which restricts its ability to use memory.

I just gotta say that after doing 3 short slide shows this week I’m about ready to toss this app because the performance is just unbearably draggy and laggy. Funny thing, I don’t remember it was so slow when I last used it a year ago. So I have some hope that somebody can think of some solution monday.

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Yes FotoMagico is only 32bit (and will unfortunately remain so for the time being), because it relies on QuickTime, which doesn’t support 64bit. Until newer APIs like AVFoundation are as feature complete as QUickTime is, we need to stick with QuickTime.

Regarding the bad performance that you described: Yes, performance could be better, but I am a bit surprised about the amount of lag that you are experiencing. Almost sound like a problem I noticed with 3.8 on Lion Prerelease, which was fixed for Lion GM. Did you ever try on another machine (possibly with another graphics card) to see if this makes a difference?

BTW, we are currently working improving performance for FotoMagico 4.0, but that release will be some time off.

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By the way: Is there any special reason you don’t update OSX and FotoMagico?

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I tried opening the same show on a macbook pro. Its response to mouse drags was smoother. The slow display of the next slide, esp. when going from single image to pan/zoom or vice versa, was the same.

Re upgrades: FM 3.8.1 crashed once almost as soon as I started using it so I went back to 3.7.6. I could give it another try.

I am in no rush to install Lion for several reasons. Generally I wait on major OS releases until the “point-one” version; plus I’ve read the reviews and don’t see any features I especially want and a lot of IOS-ification I don’t. Do you know of technical changes in Lion that improve your product’s behavior?

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Oh, and – re my threat to “toss” FM? Hollow threat! I’ve looked at every alternative I could find and none have the features. I get more detailed control with Photo to Movie. Alas, it can’t do a watchable real-time preview. FM’s buttery-smooth real-time output to a second screen (my HDTV) is a winner.

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Right, I’m using FM 3.8.1 and don’t see any improvement. I hadn’t mentioned the downright spooky performance of Titles (both 3.7 and 3.8). Double-click on a title to select the text and start typing – it is a full second before the first character appears. Wait for it to appear and type the next character, another full second goes by. I haven’t seen keyboard lag like that since about 1985 on a NeXT box. (ooh, bad memories)