Speed up packaged game initial loading?

I have a packaged project. It’s quite large (8gb). It plays a movie on loading, that can be skipped, but it takes a very long time to load on some computers, sometimes so much so, that it goes to a black screen after the movie has played, being unresponsive during this time. Is there any way I can speed up the loading process to make it fit within the movie time? The movie is about one minute long. The first level that loads is an empty map with the UMG menu in it, and it streams in the second map which is the actual world, but the game takes long to even get to this point.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, I’d rather not add a super long loading movie to the game if I can help it. I’d like to get to the menu ASAP.

You could try to run the game with log console open (-LOG in to command line) and see what takes longer time. This might be unsolvable issue UE4 is big and it takes some time to initiate.

Thanks! I tried the log command as you suggested, and it mentions the amount of virtual memory/physical memory free (9gb free) and then nothing in the log until the loading movie is 90% finished and the menu level opens. So there is nothing in the log during opening movie. Is there some deeper log setting? I can tell it’s doing SOMETHING, it just does not say anything about it in the log