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Helicon Focus frame switching is super-slow

Posted: 03.04.2018 02:59
by brucek
Helicon Focus 6.71 pro
Windows 10 Pro, 1709, 64-bit
Intel Core i7-4770K @ 3.50 GHz
32 GB RAM

Recently, switching between frames and outputs in Helicon Focus has slowed down drastically for me. Selecting a different output or frame (in retouch mode or after a render) used to take at most a few seconds, but now takes 30 seconds or more. Sometimes a lot more. I get the blue spinny hourglass pointer and the window title says "Not responding." Needless to say, this makes retouching nearly impossible. Other programs, including Lightroom are working normally.

I have plenty of ram and the program is barely touching it. For example, I currently have a 169 frame stack of 4256x2832 images loaded and it's only using 971MB of ram. (Why is that, btw? Couldn't you improve performance by caching the frames in RAM rather than on temp disk?) The 8 threads of the processor are not taxed at all and Helicon is not even breaking 1% cpu utilization during this time. I have lots of disk space available. This happens on short stacks of only a few dozen as well as larger 200 frame stacks. One thing that IS slow on this machine is my internet access, which is currently extremely limited, but I can't imagine Helicon should care about that.

I have not experimented with different startup scenarios, but I'm starting from the Lightroom export plugin.

I did try to "wipe" the settings, but there was no improvement.

Is there something that can get messed up in the configuration to cause this slowdown? Any known issues with recent Windows updates? Suggestions for debugging or improving this?

Re: Helicon Focus frame switching is super-slow

Posted: 03.04.2018 14:26
by Stas Yatsenko
I can't think of any reason why it would suddenly become slower. Suspect external reasons (rather than internal error in Helicon Focus): either you computer became slower, or the images became longer to decode, or something else of that nature.

Anyway, try the new version of Helicon Focus: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1HNA0zd2NSVyjIDFzgfK54I_ZNVHuBi6_

Re: Helicon Focus frame switching is super-slow

Posted: 09.04.2018 08:59
by brucek
Thanks Stas, I'll try the new version and let you know.

Re: Helicon Focus frame switching is super-slow

Posted: 12.04.2018 02:23
by brucek
7.0 feels a lot faster! However, every time I go into retouch mode, it crashes. :-/
(Bug submitted from Helicon Focus.)

Re: Helicon Focus frame switching is super-slow

Posted: 12.04.2018 10:19
by Stas Yatsenko
Thanks for the report. We're fixed this error just recently, but there are more errors in retouching that we haven't fixed yet so I can't give you an improved version of Focus 7.0 right now. You should probably install Focus 6.8.0 from our website, and accept the lower performance while we iron out the issues from 7.0.