Loading, please wait message will not resolve, avi. files never processed

[Sarah Carter]

Hi there, 

I am very new to PIVlab and am looking to generate a velocity profile of actin filament assembly and alignment on supported lipid bilayers. I have the newest version of PIVlab installed on both my MacBook and the lab PC and both times I attempt to run the analysis, the Loading, please wait message never disappears. A colleague that has used PIVlab before was able to successfully run my movie on their Windows PC and it took about an hour to run. I am not sure how to troubleshoot this.

Thank you!

Sarah

[thielickeoptolution]

Dear Sarah, first of all, you should not use video files. Processing performance is much worse with them. Convert lossless to image files first. And if you have issue with PIVlab, you should copy and paste the contents of the status window. There will be an error message.

[Sarah Carter]

Is it necessary to convert my movie into individual image files and is there a way to do this in FIJI? Each movie has about 180 frames. I find this perplexing given that a colleague in another lab was able to process the movie fine, it just took about an hour. Where can I find the status window? When I started the analysis, PIVlab never generated an estimate for time remaining, rather it just continued to hover on the loading screen.

Thanks,

Sarah

[William]

I guess you are working in Matlab with the PIVlab toolbox? Then just look at what the Matlab window says. I would try to convert the movies in Matlab, just ask Chatgpt for a way to do it. That should be easy.

[Sarah Carter]

I was able to split my movie into individual images which I've stored as .tiff files within a folder. Another issue I've run into is that after opening the PIVlab app in Matlab and selecting the folder I wish to open my files from, the Matlab user interface comes back to the front and I can't click back onto PIVlab. Not sure if this is a Mac issue? I had to force quit Matlab and try again, only to run into the same issue.

[William]

Hi. We would need to see all the messages from the command window that is visible on your screen shot.

[William]

But... You already saw all these messages, right? You had to press "Any key" to ignore all of them.

[Sarah Carter]

Yes, I had already seen all of these messages and pressed any key to open PIVlab in the first place. There were no new messages generated after this in the command window. I simply cannot toggle back onto PIVlab once the Matlab interface comes back to the front.

[William]

Sorry, I don't understand the problem. The text in the command window apparently already told you the problem. I can see something like "PIVlab won't work like this". What is unclear about the message?

[Sarah Carter]

Sorry, I didn't realize there was a problem with the software itself. This is what my command window says after trying to start PIVlab.

-> Starting PIVlab...

-> Use the command "PIVlab_GUI(Nr_of_cores)" to select the amount of computation cores.

-> PIVlab 3.12, built on: 24-Sep-2025 13:47:17 ...
-> Using MATLAB version 25.2 (R2025b) on MACA64.
-> User path is /Users/sarahcarter/Documents/MATLAB
-> Write access in current folder ok.

-> All required package folders found.

-> UI generated.
-> Menu generated.

-> Matlab version check ok.

Image Processing Toolbox not accessible! PIVlab won't work like this.
A license has been found, but the toolbox could not be accessed.
This is not a PIVlab related issue. Before you can use PIVlab, you need to make sure that the following command can be run without error message from the MATLAB command line:
"J = adapthisteq(rand(8,8))" (enter this without quotes)

Press any key to continue... (but remember, PIVlab won't work like this...)

[William]

This issue seems to happen sometimes when Matlab is not installed properly. I would recommend to uninstall Matlab and then reinstall. Maybe you have a system administrator that can do this? The problem is that the image processing toolbox of Matlab is not installed prope5. This is not a PIVlab related issue.

[William]

Do you have a suggestion how I could improve this error message? I am was trying to make this message clear, but you are not the first one that misunderstood / overlooked the message.

[Sarah Carter]

I think the "Press any key to continue" gave me the impression that I could still bypass the error, even though you do say PIVlab will not work. The error message and explanation where you say this is not a PIVlab-related issue is totally fine, but it is hidden within a bunch of surrounding text, so I didn't even see it the first few times. Not sure if you can include something in all caps like, "IMPORTANT: PIVlab will not work until this error is resolved," or maybe bold the text so that it stands out more. The only thing my eyes were drawn to was the, "Press any key to continue" statement!

[William]

Thanks for your suggestion. When I think about the sentence "This is not a PIVlab related issue", maybe that also gives the impression that PIVlab will work. The issue is not caused by PIVlab, but it will totally affect it. I'll make this clearer!