Keynote constantly beach-balling

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Keynote constantly beach-balling

Has anyone any idea why my keynote project keeps beach-balling?

It's about 600mb - with alpha channel quicktimes, normal quicktimes, audio and standard keynote graphical stuff.

It'll beach-ball when I'm saving, when I go to the file menu, and plenty of other times.

When I've made a minor adjustment to a piece of text - and press save.. again... it'll take forever to save.

Otherwise, the computer is fairly up to speed - I've no complaints in it's performance for After effects, photoshop, final cut, dvd studio pro etc.

thanks.

G5 Tower, Mac OS X (10.5.7)

Posted on Jul 21, 2009 8:24 AM

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Answer 1

Jul 21, 2009 4:06 PM in response to andrewdread

How much space do you have left on your hard drive? OSX and OSX apps need a very healthy minimum of 10% free hard drive space 20% is better.

Other possibilities you are saving to somewhere slow such as a slow congested external Hard Drive, over a network or to the Net. Or you have something performing extra functions such as indexing or compression.

You have a fairly slow machine and with a large file it is not surprising that it may have got slow.

To get an accurate view of what is using your resources, open *Activity Monitor* in your Utilities folder inside Applications.

Peter

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Answer 2

andrewdread Author

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Jul 22, 2009 1:39 AM in response to PeterBreis0807

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your response.

I have 200gb of space left on my 750gb Macintosh HD (the file is saved on this drive). It's a Quad core 2.5ghz PowerPC G5 with 4gb Ram.

I don't have any problems with my other software, including Apple's Final Cut Studio suite and Adobe CS3 products.

As far as I can tell on the activity monitor, Keynote takes it's fair share of the system power but no more than the other programmes. I've shut the other programmes down to see if it helps but i do still have issues.

I guess it being a big file (which is because of the movies) doesn't help?

thanks again.

Andrew

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Answer 3

Jul 22, 2009 1:47 AM in response to andrewdread

andrewdread wrote:
Hi Peter,

I guess it being a big file (which is because of the movies) doesn't help?

I think must be it, especially if you have transitions etc. Try removing the movies and putting in visual placeholders which you replace when it is almost finished.

Alternatively break it into shorter, smaller presentations with hyperlinks to open the next one.

I worry that if you stand up to do your presentation that it will all grind to a crawl then, unless you do something about it now.

Peter

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Answer 4

andrewdread Author

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Jul 22, 2009 2:55 AM in response to PeterBreis0807

Hi Peter

I've tried removing the movies and sure it enough things have got faster.

I have another thread on this forum in which I mention I can't render my project to quicktime (it says 'an unknown error has occurred). If i remove the movies I can render the quicktime too.

It seems to me that although technically keynote can handle movies (including movies with alpha channels), in reality it slows the machine down loads and causes exports to fail.

Happily I don't have to stand up and do the presentation - it is intended that it runs as a movie (a training movie) online. It was started in keynote so that an element of interactivity could be introduced further down the line in the series of training videos that I'm doing. Also so that I could work out how useful keynote can be to me as a video editor in general.

I'm beginning to think that Keynote, whilst it is good for the text, the transitions, the design tools etc is bad for this purpose and I'm thinking I might need to start the project again in after effects.

thanks,

Andrew

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