Motion Analysis cancels when switching focus to another app

Question

Motion Analysis cancels when switching focus to another app

I'm having a bizzare problem with motion 5 on OS X 10.6.8. When I analyze the motion of a clip for either an analyze motion or a stabilizer behavior the progress bar starts normally. When I switch focus to another app, either by hitting Cmd-TAB or clicking the other app in the dock or clicking one of its windows, motion analysis cancels in Motion and the progressbar that says "Analyzing Movement of …" disappears, as if I had pressed the stop button. Analysis is stoppped and has to be restarted from the beginning to finish it.

The problem is caused by the act of switching away from Motion, not by having another app in front, as is evidenced by the fact that I can do an analysis by having motion in the background and Cmd-clicking the analyze button (whcih is a generic way of clicking in a window without bringing it to the front), as long as either motion always stays in the background. I can switch into Motion and the analysis continues, I just can't switch out of it.

I tried in another user account on my machine that has no bells or whistles installed - same thing happened. Tried without my standard utilities running (Quicksilver, BetterTouchTool, Caffene, Soundsource and CopyLess/CopyPaster) - same thing.

So the workaround for now is to have motion in the background on my 2nd monitor and Cmd-click the analyze button and not bring motion to the front again until it's done analyzing.

Anyone else had this problem? could not find it by searching. I realize I have pretty much the lowest supported configuration for the Final Cut X suite, but it is supported. Any ideas?

MBP 15" 2.4GHz (early 2008), PB G4 15" 1.25GHz, Mac OS X (10.6.6), 4GB RAM, Logic Pro 9.1, MaxMSP 5.1, Final Cut Express, MOTU Ultr

Posted on Sep 7, 2011 4:15 PM

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Answer 1

Jazzdogg

Level 1

4 points

Sep 9, 2011 9:32 PM in response to Arvid Tomayko-Peters1

I too am curious as to the solution of this issue. It's rather annoying - Motion 4 didn't do this.

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Answer 2

Sep 20, 2011 9:12 PM in response to Jazzdogg

I'm thinking it has something to do with the fact that Motion is 'playing' when analyzing - that analysis is considered a 'play' action, and playing always stops when focus is switched away from motion. If there was an option to allow playing in the background, that would potentially allow analysis to not stop when switching focus away from motion.app, but i cannot find such a setting.

The 5.0.1 update does not help at all for this issue, but does seem to make the interface generally faster and less buggy it seems on my system so far. Motion 5.0.1 seems to use less RAM except when its actually doing something, like motion analysis, at which point it brings my early 2008 MBP to its knees, as i did before.

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