In the WTF department.

I don’t like to swear and try not to do it as much as possible but stuff like this just gets me going and IMO deserves it.

Pinnacle Studio 20 Ultimate. Video editing software. New software version. Probably been using it since Version 2.

I put a hour and half of video on the timeline and the computer stops responding. Click on ‘File’ to save the project, it takes 3 minutes for the drop down menu to show up. Try to get into setup, same thing!

It’s so F’n slow Windows pops up the ‘this program has stopped responding’ menu.

Mind you this is an 8 core AMD FX-8350 CPU, 32G of memory, Areca battery backed up RAID controller, 6G nVidia GTX 980 Ti graphics adapater, and 8G nVidia GTX 1080 graphics adapter computer and its not responding??!!

I look at the resource monitor and 7 out of 8 cores are screaming along doing something. But what?

I finally notice this green and yellow bar moving slowly to the right above the timeline. Then I wonder, is this thing rendering?

I didn’t tell it to render. I didn’t click on any render button. Why is it apparently rendering? Rhetorical question because all I want to do is make it stop!

The project is no where near ready to be rendered. I just put the scenes on the timeline for God’s sake!

So I start looking around in the Setup Control Panel for Background Rendering or some such thing to disable it.

Can’t find an F’n thing. Before I can even do that I have to delete the video from the timeline so it stops rendering so the computer can be used!

Actually looked in the manual. Search for ‘background render’, ‘background’, ‘render’, nothing nada zip.

Google for it. Find some suggestions, one being you can wait till the background rendering finishes. Not. Find some stuff for older versions to disable background rendering but what is said to do can’t be done in Version 20.

Finally find some obscure reference to Optimization. And a sliding bar you’re supposed adjust to give you a good balance of performance. Huh? No reference there regarding background rendering.

Is it supposed to be intuitive that a sliding ‘Optimization’ bar is how to disable background rendering?

It isn’t to me… But that was the trick…