Interesting observations PureChaosX. I had never seen this behavior in previous versions, but now that you mention it, I just recently started working with longer WAV files. Although I have often done short voice-overs within PowerDirector, and those came out as WAVs, so what does that mean? That PD can't handle WAV files over a few seconds in length?
I have to admit too that it makes no sense to me that the program can generate video thumbnails in seconds, but a relatively tiny audio file is too much for it. The whole caching/shadow file thing seem to cause more trouble than it's worth...I feel like it's connected somehow. I discovered that the "upgrade" to PowerDirector 16 had overwritten my preferences from PD15. "Enable shadow files" was on by default in PD16, so I had to discover/disable that before the software started acting more normal. With that option checked, it was soaking the CPU at about 35 percent, which made the cooling fans rev up, and it was also using a fair bit of network bandwidth, apparently (continuously) writing to a USB drive connected to my server.
And as you may know, Windows does a pretty bad job of congruent read/writes to USB drives, so it was super inefficient. It would make a lot more sense for that kind of file to be on a local SSD drive, but PD doesn't provide any way to specify different locations for temp files. I guess it would be okay if I had a multi-terabyte SSD, but I do not, so I just can't afford the space. It seems like a carry-over from a time when RAM was more expensive and Windows wasn't any good at managing RAM even if it was present. But in the era of Windows 7 and beyond, I just don't see much value in caching to disk. Especially a mechanical drive connected via USB to computer that is accessed over a network. It's pretty fast for sequential writes of single files, but it's just no good for what PD seems to be doing.
When idle, PD16 doesn’t seem to be putting any load on the CPU or network since I disabled shadow files, but it still insists on creating folders, so there must be some underlying dependence upon those locations. It might be interesting to do a test with PD16 configured to use my local SSD. But even if it worked, it would be frustrating to have to add another layer of time and complexity to my workflow.
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-Mark
Cable Solutions