I have some problem with the latest software version of Time-Lapse Tool. When trying to import sequence from a mounted NAS drive into the program, it freeze or extreamly slow. After force closing the program, I need to disable and enable Lan card to reach the drive again as it makes windows explorer also freeze. All other communication with the NAS is perfect, very fast copy speed and I can even also use a huge Adobe After Effect file from the mounted drive... I have Win10 Pro Any idea, what can i change to make it usable (I have tons of sequences on the NAS)? Thank Chris
Importing sequence from NAS
Time-Lapse Tool
posted this
20 November 2020
Hello Chris,
Short answer. Time-Lapse Tool does not support network and even cloud drives.
Long answer. Interaction with a network is always asynchronous and unpredictable. In addition, many home NASes uses samba to emulate Windows network sharing. And even the recent version of the samba, the server might not work well with Windows clients under a heavy workload. Opening and reviewing thousands of images requires reading at least a small piece of data from every image file. The software does some of these reading operations in parallel to speed up processing. Such workload is really heavy for the server and it cannot be compared with reading even a single 50MB file in Photoshop.
The only recommendation for your case is to copy files to a local hard drive. You could also try the beta version of the software. It reworked interactions with disks to reduce parallel workload where possible.
Best Regards,
Time-Lapse Tool team
Last edited 18 December 2020
Mid2100
posted this
20 November 2020
Thanks for the answer. I understand what you telling me about the network drives. The only thing what makes me keep thinking is that, it was working well for years, than I've changed to a newer and stronger NAS. So some problem might be with that. BR Chris
Time-Lapse Tool
posted this
20 November 2020
Chris, what NAS did you use? Anyway, please let me know if the beta version works better for you. You might also want to disable time-split import option and importing the entire folder content as a sequence.
I clearly understand that NAS is the perfect place to store a lot of photos for time-lapses. We are also actively using samba based servers for our internal tests. When we worked on the 100k image test, a network share also failed to handle these numbers. That was the final reason to exclude network drives from UI. However, the most recent version of samba 4 works much better and we could try another series of tests with it.