Flyerace Loc: Mt Pleasant, WI

I processed one vacation in two different slide show presentations. The first has 408 photos, 4 pieces of music and takes advantage of the Pan & Zoom function. Total play time 23 minutes. ( I chose to reduce the quality of the presentation to get it to export. At full best quality, I stopped it at 24 hours) It took over 13 hours to finish exporting.

The second show was cut down to just a certain topic within the slideshow and has two pieces of music, no pan & zoom. Total play time 10 minutes and 40 seconds. This also took a very long time to export, over 8 hours.

I have a pretty fast pc. Everything photo wise is on external drives (5T). All photos were JPEG prior to making the slideshow. I also have many other slide shows that, although it has always been a slow process, none took more than an hour or two to export. One was more than twice as big as the first one I described here.

I have the latest LR updates. I have a stand alone license for LR. Has anyone else experienced this type of slow export? It hardly makes it worth it to use LR to process the videos. I'm going to ask people for suggestions on how to make this faster.

cmc65

First thing I would look at would be how much ram you are running.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Yes, and open task manager (ctrl-alt-del) while the job is running, and look at CPU, memory and disc utilization.

Flyerace Loc: Mt Pleasant, WI

I have 8 GB of ram. The task manager says that LR is using 25% and the amount of ram being used is 27%. That should be adequate. Remember, I said that I had exported LARGER videos prior to this and they were faster, even though they seemed slow. I believe this is a LR problem. Just wanted to know if anyone else has the problem and what they did about it. I think I need to change to another program. Thanks for the suggestions, they helped me know the computer is adequate.

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

Any process like this run with product on an external USB drive is going to be slow, due to the nature of USB. Next time, export the images to a new catalog on your HD and see how ling it takes.
Also, 8 Gb of RAM is the barest minimum for Lightroom. If it has to use the swap drive on your HD, and deal with an external drive for sources, yes the operation will be slow.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

I agree that 8GB is marginal, but I don't see where in the post that he has the data on USB drives, the OP just mentions external drives, and they appear to be too large to be USBs. I absolutely agree that paging to disk can be mind-numbingly slow. The OP mentioned CPU and RAM utilization, but didn't specify disc, so hard to tell. But unless the RAM utilization is at/near 100% (which it isn't) and the disc usage is also high (is the disc access light on constantly?), I'd suspect an application issue rather than HW.

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

The OP has a pretty fast PC, so unless he has an external SATA, I am pretty sure he is referring to USB.

Flyerace Loc: Mt Pleasant, WI

I am not exporting to a USB. I am exporting to a 5T hard drive. Nothing is working at capacity. It seems to me that it is a software problem. Remember I said I had previously (in another version of LR-prior to the latest update) exported a file twice the size and it didn't take more than two hours. This is a recent problem. I guess no one else has used LR for a slideshow, or everyone is using an older version of LR. Thanks for trying.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Gotcha. I interpreted your comment to be referring to USB memory sticks, but you meant a USB-connected external SATA drive - correct? In that case, it would depend on whether it was USB-2 or USB-3. If USB-2, the max data rate is 60 MB/sec, slower than the fastest SATA drives, but not dog-slow by any means. On the other hand, USB-3 is substantially faster than any rotating HD, so probably not a limiting factor. Of course, these are maximum numbers as are the published specs for SATA drives, which are usually for large sequential accesses on the outside (fastest) tracks which require the fewest and shortest head seeks. It really comes down to the manner in which the application and the file system read/write to the drive. For smaller requests and longer seeks, drive performance can be slower than either USB2 or 3, so hard to tell where the limitation is without more information or benchmarking.

lwerthe1mer Loc: Birmingham, Alabama

I don't know all the technical terms you guys are throwing around, but I find the time it takes to download photos into LR totally unacceptable. When I want to view a slideshow, I download to Shutterfly.

mborn Loc: Massachusetts

I find that processing slide shows and videos from LR is slow But not as slow as the OP stated. Even when I use Proshow Producer takes time

gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast

I had the same issues with Photoshop Elements with Elements on my PC's drive and my photos on an External drive. Got a new computer with more RAM and better processor and still a problem. Then restored my catalogue to the PC's HD, much much better. The only thing I use the external drives for is to do my backups. Also, realize that slideshow projects are graphics files and therefore require much more resources than photo files to process. Plus, it seems that LR and Elements, probably Photoshop too, like to have the program and its files all on the same drive. I also tuck all the picture folders that I generate into PSE's default Adobe folder under Pictures.

Flyerace Loc: Mt Pleasant, WI

I only have programming on my computer hard drive. My plan all along was to NEVER have a photo on my computer hard drive. ALL of my photos are on a 5T WD Elements external hard drive accessed through a fast USB3 connector. (Don't worry, I have two more 5T drives. One designated as backup and the other as duplicate of the original.) I only write to one 5T hard drive and there is a ton of space available on the external hard drive (4.54T total/ 4.22T available). Previously owned computers had programming and photos stored on a large internal hard drive. Processing was slow and the computer couldn't function properly. Decided to switch the storage to outside my computer and just have processing on my internal hard drive. It has worked slowly, but faster than this new update.

Thanks for your input. I'm changing to another program.