As good as MaxQDA is in many things it does, it ultimately fails when it comes to importing large media files. I have multiple videos (each 20-25 GB in size) to import into my MaxQDA project. Here is what happens:
1. Import transcript
2. MaxQDA find the time codes and asks for the associated video file so I show it where it lies
3. For about 10 minutes, MaxQDA displays a progress bar "Preparing media file ...." (as a side note: the remaining time displayed is wrong)
4. During that long 10 minute wait MaxQDA is completely unusable.
Whatever MaxQDA is doing during that time, it should do it in the background and let me continue to work on other things.
I'm assuming that two things are going on:
1. The waveform is being extracted
2. The file is being copied to the externals folder. No, wait, it looks like it is also being modified, because the file in the externals folder is only 6 GB in size, not 24 GB like the original. Not sure why this is necessary (or even useful) but either way: both of these things can be done in the background.
That so much time is being wasted for copying the file to the externals folder is particularly annoying because I will delete it from there anyway since there is no point of duplicating data in this manner. So, on a positive note, I want to congratulate the MaxQDA team for making MaxQDA so flexible when it comes to where it looks for the media files (https://www.maxqda.com/en/support/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=938&p=2422&hilit=externals#p2423).
Any chance that media import will be faster any time soon?
Version: MAXQDA 2018
System: Windows 10