Apple Motion 5.9 almost stopped working again

There are so many unknowns. You mentioned M1Max and 5.9 but did not say which OS. We also have no idea of how complex the projects may be, or if any plugins are involved. Older plugins could be playing a role, as could be some third party software that in principle has nothing to do with Motion.

If you want us to have a look, you could start by running Etrecheck and posting its report here.

It would also be useful if you could share one sample project where problems arise so others could test on their macs.

Thank you. I have had only the time to try and open it, and Motion was already struggling, with noticeable beach balls.

I have created a RAM Preview, which took about 2 minutes to do.

With that RAM Preview, of course, it plays.

I am on an M4 Pro MBP, so a very new and fast machine. I have to leave now (teaching), but will look into it again later on.

I think that there are two things here that are making Motion struggle with your project.

1) The project is rather long (10 minutes)

2) The project has a very large number of layers, each a group with subobjects and behaviors.

The following is just a suggestion, in no way implying there is anything wrong in your project.

I tried to produce something similar to your project, with 10 minutes duration, but using emitters instead of dozens of groups and objects. I did not take the time to emulate what your project does, just try to see if I could get something like it. The difference in performance was like day and night. I could have an emitter "producing" these vertical lines descending, and Motion had no trouble with it.

Perhaps by leveraging Motion's tools like emitters and replicators we can achieve similar results in a way that requires far fewer resources and that results in Motion working smoothly, and still achieving the desired outcome.

I was also intrigued by the file size, and your description of how it seemed to grow exponentially without a clear reason adds to the mystery. I am now thinking that there some correlation between the project groing so much in size and the sluggishness of Motion.

A Motion project is in an a textual XML format, and this one is nearly ONE MILLION lines long (specifically 966709).

Perhaps if one figures out why it blows up in such an extraordinary fashion one can avoid the situation that triggers this, and can operate in a normal way.

Alas, I have no idea what might be behind this.

Could you describe your project? Explain if and how objects might be linked together in animations. (Screenshots would be helpful too.) By "linked" I mean pretty much any behavior that uses parameters from one object to another.

The only thing I can think of that would generate a million line xml is "circular references" somewhere (which is really hard to explain.) It usually involves 3 or more objects trying to link from one another, then from the last one back to the first one... with a "related" parameter (not always what you might expect!) Are you trying to do something like this in your project?

[I'm not patient enough to wait minutes, much less hours, for Motion to finish what it's supposed to be doing. If it hangs for 30+ seconds, I usually force quit and consider it *crashed*. Then restart and rework the problem I just created.]

Thank you for reporting back.

I was really hoping that using a replicator instead of some four thousand rectangles would get rid of the slowness.

The duration may be an issue, but would not explain the size of the xml.

Would it be possible to share the current version of the project?