# ProPresenter on an iMac Troubleshooting



## StradivariusBone (Jul 5, 2015)

So our church rig is a 5 year-old iMac running Mavericks and utilizes ProPresenter v5. We output to a TripleHead2Go to drive our main displays and we were utilizing a Sabrent display adapter to run a confidence/stage display (though that recently failed). We now take the third output from the TH2GO and run that to the FOH projector. 

Over the past few weeks we've been noticing a disruptive slow-down in how the computer would load slides, particularly video. Today it came to a head and was freezing a few times a minute and completely failed to play a video. On the surface it seems like a buffering issue as it will run, pause (spinning wheel of death) and then continue at random intervals. However, it has 8GB of memory, over half of which is going unused and there are no smoking guns in the processes either. 

It is a multi-use computer in the sense that many people have access to it, though it is generally used to play music and other media for services. After today, I went ahead and applied everything that the Figure 53 guys recommend for QLab since I use that for my day job, but as I was using the computer it became more and more bogged down, to the point where opening a Finder window would take 1-3 minutes- all while still showing little loading on the CPU and/or memory. 

I grew up as a Windows/PC guy, so while I understand the mechanics of what a computer needs, I'm at a loss to find the tricks with a Mac and I feel like there might be something I'm missing. My gut is saying this might be a failing hard drive, but running the startup disk utility didn't immediately show anything useful or wrong. I also recall Macs having a hard time with cooling, and that over time the components would fail just out of heat stress, is this still a thing?

My main question to the more Mac-enlightened of the board- where to begin?


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## dbaxter (Jul 5, 2015)

I had a Mac-mini go through the same stages of slowness and it ended up in a couple days where it would not boot at all. It was a hard drive failure. So scramble to back up everything before it dies on you.
But, like you, I'm more a PC guy [Some may find them more user friendly, but I find them software developer hostile], so it could be something entirely different.


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## StradivariusBone (Jul 5, 2015)

It's on a Time Machine backup (which is one thing I really like about Macs). I'd like to spec a SSD to replace it, but I'd rather be sure it's dying before I convince the staff parish to drop that kind of bread.


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## StradivariusBone (Jul 8, 2015)

Ok, so restoring to a previous backup and installing Yosemite seems to have improved the situation. Can't find the smoking gun for what caused the previous failure, but I think our worship director might have downloaded some very high resolution video backgrounds that weren't helping. Our projectors only run at 1024x768 so there's no sense in taxing the computer with anything significantly higher. 

Thanks for the advice, Dave.


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## dbaxter (Jul 8, 2015)

Well, that was certainly cheaper. 
I suppose a high resolution wallpaper could affect screen refresh times. Matching picture resolution with display resolution is certainly a good move in any event.


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## Amiers (Jul 8, 2015)

I would say to be sure is to run different video formats through ProPresenter and see if you can mimic what was happening. When I started setting up our video playback parts here we have a 720p projector and after a few different FPS version I found that 29.9 worked the best with my projector. Where 25 and 27 had issues just sometimes.


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## StradivariusBone (Jul 8, 2015)

Are you changing up the FPS on the computer or the projector? I have a layman's knowledge with ProPresenter and haven't seen an option there to adjust frame rate. 

I'm honestly grasping at straws on what caused it. Nothing was installed as of late other than a slew of sleek slides (say that five times fast!). I'll check with our Worship director and see what he was installing.


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## Amiers (Jul 9, 2015)

I was talking about changing the files FPS. Pretty much any video converter can do this easily.


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## StradivariusBone (Jul 9, 2015)

That would make more sense! You had me thinking there was some sort of secret display output menu I had missed.


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## Amiers (Jul 9, 2015)

Tbh With Macs I wouldn't be surprised if you could do something like that.


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