Lion and Keynote Problems

You were right, unchecking the, Back up previous version in Keynote preferences and making a duplicate file really did make a huge difference with my large Keynote file. Evidently, when you install Lion, the old Keynote files become somewhat corrupt and need to be resaved.

Thanks for the tip. My files are working much better than before. It still takes longer then I would like to save or edit them, but I no longer have to wait 2 mintes to edit a word in the file.

Thank you

Profent wrote:

You were right, unchecking the, Back up previous version in Keynote preferences and making a duplicate file really did make a huge difference with my large Keynote file....

As I noted earlier, I only needed to duplicate one Keynote document to get this to work for all other Keynote documents. Weird, huh? I did not have to duplicate every known Keynote document on my computer, thank goodness! That would have been a chore.

Thank you

I'm really pleased that it worked for you. Based on the continuing conversation here, either it doesn't work for everyone, or not everyone has tried it. ::grin::

Ciao. Joel.

it is not ridiculous

I have used Keynote from week it was released. I switched because it was a much better application for my purpose - lots of videoclips and heavy files. Usually I have worked in KN, lecturing in TV-journalism, using/including the entier file in the project. This has made the "dangers of moving" between computers a lesser hazle.

I installed OS X 10.7 when it came this summer, and started last week to prepare my lectures.... I rewrite the lectures, some new examples, another focus included, but I build on the one from last sesaon. My starting file was 4,4 gb - working fine last year. After two minutes editing text only, the program hung on the spinning wheel... and kept on hanging.... It crashed ten times...I backed up the orignial file by saving it to a new harddisk.... no help - same result of wait - spin - wait - spin - 10 minutes - forced quit.

I then went to this support/discussion group which regularly solve my mac challenges when the occur, just to realize that this had been going on since the begining of OS X "Lion".... By the way - I have never used the "backup previous version" function you guys talk about .... thats just a spaceblocker to me. I did check though that it was not on...

So I ended up solving my problem using the old lecture to cover my first need....

When launching the presentation in the auditorium whith the students I was very quick to get it full screen, before it started its disabling, destructive autosave.... if that is whats causing the problem.... (Apple where are you?!?)

So I wanted to work around it ditching the old projects, making new ones from schratch, and this time not including the whole files, just the "shortcuts" from QT. Same things happen.... no cure starting from scratch - i did an edit in text, included a video shortcut and the spinning wheel comes.... stays for 4 - 5 minutes.... then I make another small change - work for 45 - 90 seconds.... another wait for 4 - 5 minutes....

I do not get it - since this problem is so clearly expressed - why is there not a fix for it.

Tomorrow I´ll have to install my last Office bundle.... I left MS Office two years ago, after writing the manuscript of my last book in Pages, not a single word in MS-Word.... Is there someone in this group who has Keynote working so please share the way to handle it.

Disabling the save option IS NOT A solution for any file with embedded video. Period. The only real solution is to downgrade KN to version 5.05. This is the one before the current version with autosave enabled. Search this post for my instructions on how to do it. You need to have a disk version of an earlier installer. If you acquired KN from the app store your only option for editing is to suffer long bouts of autosaves, or to work from a duplicate without doing ANY save of any kind as autosave starts after your first save. For doing presentations your only alternative is to lock the file and use the locked version for your presentation. Good luck. By the way, I have tried the so called "solution" of changing save behavior in KN on four machines with various versions of Lion. It does not work on any of them with KNs with embedded video. None of them. Nada. Size of file doesn't matter. Amount of Ram doesnt matter (I've tried 2g, 4g, 8g, and 10g). As Yvan Koenig has pointed out in another thread dealing with duplicate vs save as it is a basic design fault in all iwork apps that will need to be addressed.

I miss the old Discussions format where you could spec your hardware at the bottom of your comment. I think it would be very helpful to this discussion if people would post the basic specs of their machine. My experience, albeit limited, is that size matters when it comes to RAM and Lion and working with large files. My home iMac (2.66 GHz / 2 GB RAM) labors under Lion, especially when files are large or I have multiple apps open. On the other hand my work iMac (3.06 GHz / 8 GB RAM) works beautifully.

If everyone would post their machine specs, it would add a few more tangible variables into the pool for analysis. Solutions by discussion thread are an iterative process that zeroes in on the solution. From my experience, the problem seems to be with the autosave/versions feature on large files on machines where memory is limited.

I have a good test in the works as I am going to upgrade the memory of my home iMac from 2 to 6 GB. I'm not changing any software until then. I'll report back on the results.

And thanks again for the suggestions to date.

If everyone would post their machine specs, it would add a few more tangible variables into the pool for analysis.

iMac 8,1s and MBP 3,1s all with 4GB ram and ALL work perfectly with keynote and iWork apps. Keynotes range from superlarge to supersmal size.

Set up on machine running problem Keynote application: Apple Os X 10.7.1 and 2,7 ghz Intel Core i7, 8 GB, 1333 mhz DDR3.

I think you all should Twitter something like this....

Apple users are facing problems after installing OS X Lion.

System upgrade disables Keynote.

....and then point to this discussion.

12 core Mac Pro with 32 Gigs of 1333 RAM - definetly not a hardware related issue. My old Macbook Pro laptop still working fine with the pre-lion version of Keynote and snow leopard. Keynote with death beachball all the time for big and small presentations in lion version in the Mac Pro (with the same presentations that run smoothly on the Macbook). I am a very experienced user, with computer science background. I have already call apple and had a discussion with apple employe at apple store. Nobody was aware of the problem... don't know who to talk to.

Most of us have solved most of the problem by simply doing the following:

Take any Keynote file you have problems with and simply duplicate the file and throw in the trash the original file. If you do this you won't see the beachball all the time.

I think the thread is so long people are venting their frustration without reading Joels answer to the problem!

Who are "most of us" Profent.... I have done this, without any result what-so-ever on the performance of the application, Presenter-John.

At the university many of the faculty had the same problem you had. We use large files with video content and we were frustrated big time once we started editing the files after downloading Lion. In fact, many faculty have already changed their operating system back to Leopard. As a group we spent hours on the phone with apple support. No solution. However, we have found an easy work-around solution because apple could not help us. So....Simply open your Keynote file that is giving you the problem. Duplicate it and save it. Be sure to throw the original in the trash. Things will really speed up and it is tolerable to edit the file again.

Best regrards,

you duplicated the file AND unchecked the box Olav?

J

Correct, except I checked that the box was not checked.

The original file I duplicated was on another hard drive....

By the way; the suggested solution does actually not have any rationality - what should be the point of doing theese application gymnastics... we are talking about a simple, logic context here..