On Sat (10th) I was all set to be doing visuals with Gojira at The Brook in Southampton; when I got there I tried to load up my (admittedly way complex) quartz composer composition. Now I'm not exaggerating here, it took a full 10 minutes to load and then crawled like a snail carrying a very heavy load. This is on a 1.5Ghz G4 Powerbook with 1Gb RAM; no other foreground apps running. As you can imagine - I was getting very stressed.

So, at the suggestion of the BA.dger (Q: why didn‘t I think of that??), I created a new user account, and shifted the movies and composition etc. over to the /Users/Shared directory (and then went through the tedious re-linking … ooh if quartz composer compositions are essentially just xml files, could I have just done that using plist editor or a text editor and search and replace?? Also I have one movie that I can’t find the broken reference to - will that help me find it??)

SUCCESS! Ran beautifully. So there you go - hope it helps someone avoid the stress!

SteamSHIFT out.