Recording Scene Lagging

Thanks for the links--I'll check them out when I get a little extra time.

It's definitely time to upgrade my machine, but as old as it is, it has plenty of RAM and processor. Ableton runs like a dream. It's really just the Adobe apps that don't perform well.

I did figure out how to make the AI file smaller (uncheck "save as PDF compatible"--went from 6.7mb to 875kb). That helped, but it's still glitching after recording an animation--not for ten seconds, but it isn't instantaneous as it is with the older AI file of the same puppet.

Can you provide any general ideas? I'm getting the Mac spinning rainbow ball for 10-15 seconds after every tiny maneuver--even when just disabling the red "record" buttons.

I'm running the latest (v2.1), 608x702 pixels, just one scene, one puppet with five head positions (got rid of left and right body positions in the AI file to see if that made a difference--it didn't), late 2014 Mac Mini with Mojave 3 GHz Intel Core i7 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 Intel Iris 1536 MB). This started when I created a 30 minute scene (just one puppet), so I made a new project that's only 2 minutes to see if the problem was that the project was too long---same problem.

Just had a thought that maybe it was the auto-blink, so I disabled it...didn't make a difference. Tried reducing the frame rate from 30fps to 15--also no change. Tried clearing other Adobe caches and restarting CH. I only have the dragger behavior enabled. Tried changing the buffer size--had it set on 64 from the 30 minute project because the audio wasn't playing. Just tried it at 512, lost the audio again and still getting the spinning wheel.

Ok, I just opened up each one of the old projects--they had to update because they hadn't been opened in over a year, but even with the huge 3000x3000 file, I'm not getting the wheel. I can record a new animation and it plays back immediately. The 3000x3000 puppet only had three head views, but three body views with each having all three head views in its group (2.3mb AI file) and the new one has five head views (6.4mb with just frontal body; 6.7 mb with the left and right bodies--I had made a separate Head puppet inside CH to reduce the file size--from Emily Watts' suggestion). The file size seems like the most obvious reason, but I don't understand why only two more heads (and technically, it's four FEWER heads from the 3000x3000 file) would more than double the size of the AI file AND make CH run so slowly.

Is there a way to allocate more RAM to CH? Although I don't think that's the problem...but the fan keeps kicking on even though I'm not even doing anything with CH other than trying these ideas. Nothing else (except Chrome at the moment) is open.

Here's the answer for my issue: I made a new AI doc, copied and pasted the layers into it and saved it with the "PDF compatible file" turned off--that makes the file size only 700kb.

This message has taken me two hours to compose, FYI--testing all this stuff before posting. Someone (alank99101739 perhaps? ) really needs to compile an index of how-to guides and troubleshooting--I'm certain 90% of us spend the majority of our time searching for answers to simple problems. The oksamurai videos are great, but it's like searching for a needle in a haystack...you can't possibly remember which video talks about what issue. All the correct answers spread all over the forums and videos aren't the least bit helpful if you don't know how to ask the right question. Most of us creative types are big dummies who don't fully understand computers (how could I possibly have known that my AI file was so huge because of such a simple reason?). I'm pretty sure the purpose of CC is to get Adobe products into the hands of more creative people, but if those of us who are new to Adobe are spending most of our time trying to figure out why something doesn't work, the creativity gets crushed. Making the creative process super easy should be Adobe's number one priority, don't you think?