"All" movie player drops frames

boya's picture

sorry, reoccurring issue this...

I have a project doing fractals in stereoscopic 3D with a full philharmonic orchestra next week, and putting the playback logics together I am encountering the "usual" frame dropouts. This time it is very visible with smooth graphics compared to other projects with real video I have done lately.

The system runs 4 projectors on two Matrox cards, and Syphon from one comp L(eye, attached), to another other (R). Playback of dual HD 1920x1536 Top/Bottom runs fine in Quicktime, and in singular file playback in QC with standard movie player.

Problem with frame drops comes when I trigger other movies and/or control playback speed.

I bought VideoTools yesterday, but can not get it going with the AIC or Prores files I use, and with Mjpg it performs poorly. v002 Movie Player renders the best, but handles triggering and rate change bad.

The comp compares all the players. See stickies for further info.

This thread http://kineme.net/forum/Discussion/DevelopingCompositions/ChoppyVideoinQC0 suggests rendering off the main thread, but I have no idea/time how to make my own app.

I am with 10.6.8 on a 8 core 2010 Macpro with SSD disk, ATI5870. Processors are at 15 % on when running.

Getting sweatty, any help is helpful!

PreviewAttachmentSize
Manyworlds plays not so well.qtz25.93 KB

boya's picture
Re: "All" movie player drops frames

Note: I see the way I have truncated the URL to make 002 and Kineme se the current movie will not work for most, due to "word count" way... I am sure there is a better way:?

gtoledo3's picture
Re: "All" movie player drops frames

Try making sure you are using video tools (the non QuickTime patch) with the codecs it supports.

boya's picture
Re: "All" movie player drops frames

Thanks for pointing that out. I´ll try the PNG and post back. MJPG did not work well for me

boya's picture
Re: "All" movie player drops frames

Results are gloomy...

For Kineme Video player my playback rates for 1920 x 1536, no processing, are:

FJPG average: 13, 5 fps minimum9,1 fps

I get slightly better figures for MJPG A and B: max 15 fps

PNG @100% drops to: average: 10 fps minimum 8 fps

Animation drops to 2 and 3 fps

By comparison QT7 will play back 3 of these files simultaneously @30fps without a hitch

volkerk's picture
Re: "All" movie player drops frames

With standard movie player, try disable "Asynchronous Mode", this usually speeds up things (no audio though). Also if you don't use interlaced footage (which you should avoid anyway) disable de-interlacing and play the high-qual setting.

boya's picture
Re: "All" movie player drops frames

Thanks Volkerk.

Acually this one ran better with Async, but changing pb rate stalls it. I`m off the interlaced footage. This material is generated. Running fine until I change playback rate to sync with the orchestra; anytime I mod the integrator or stopwatch, the framerates drops to 15-20 fps.

Anyone have a script for controlling pb speed without jumps or without integrator patch?

I´m almost at end of my posibillities. Considering trying to upgrade to Lion, but I´m afraid it might break my dual Matrox setup

jrs's picture
Re: "All" movie player drops frames

What version of the v002 movie player are you using? I get really bad playback performance form v4, v2 and 3 are much better

usefuldesign.au's picture
Re: "All" movie player drops frames

There's a new beta v4 that is supposed to fix a few known bugs. See this v002 forum thread.

usefuldesign.au's picture
Re: "All" movie player drops frames

Quote:
Anyone have a script for controlling pb speed without jumps or without integrator patch?

I have such marco on my old Mac I'l try and dig it up.

boya's picture
Re: "All" movie player drops frames

Thanks all.

Running new 002 beta v5 right now, v4 felt similar. I´ll try out the old ones too.

mnstri's picture
Re: "All" movie player drops frames

Try making it into an app with QuartzBuilder and control your parameters from there. That could help at least with the issues that occur when changing things with the QC editor. Worked on a project a friend of mine was working on.

gtoledo3's picture
Re: "All" movie player drops frames

I don't "get" how you expect it not to drop frames when you're scrubbing timebase live. At least that's how I'm reading what you're doing. I also wonder if you're running this on a laptop or something that just doesn't have enough power to run hd movies, plus whatever else you're doing.

Are you encoding these lossless or something? I notice a comment about png at 100%. You may be saving some processing by it not taking as much to decompress the file as it plays but I'd think your file sizes must be massive...which will probably suck, especially if you don't have an ssd.

I've run video tools next next to some high end media servers (both on Mac tower) and the playback difference was imperceptible to me. Someone else saw a little more lag when it looped...like, less than a second kind of thing. I'm not necessarily defending it, but I'd guess if it's not working well that there may be a hardware or software issue.

...and it's a real must to compile an app, and not be running in the editor.

boya's picture
Re: "All" movie player drops frames

Hey, I put the specs in my first post:

Quote:
I am with 10.6.8 on a 8 core 2010 Macpro with SSD disk, ATI5870. Processors are at 15 % on when running.

-and I am not scrubbing, rather tweaking playback rate in the 118-122 bpm range to keep pace with the orchestra.

This is not HD, rather Two films of 1920 x 768 compiled into one 1920 x 1536 top/bottom stereoscopic movie. But this should be no problem. As I mentioned before, the hardware can run three of these files at the same time @ 30 fps in QT7.

The patch runs fine at 29-30 fps at startup. My problem is that it drops to 15-20 fps when playback rate is changes, and stays there until i reset speed.

I take the point about compiling an app, but I am dubious wether I have the time to learn how to and get it right with three patches running with Syphon an OSC in between.

gtoledo3's picture
Re: "All" movie player drops frames

Fair enough, I think we have different takes on what scrubbing and HD is :) I hope it works out!

gtoledo3's picture
Re: "All" movie player drops frames

Maybe you can try using patch time or stopwatch, and multiplying it by an integrated value instead of using solely the integrator. You also might want to try it without the midi part, just to see if that's adding any lag in your system.

I don't have the kineme patch handy, but it seems like maybe there's some buffer settings that can be experimented with - if not, my apologies.

boya's picture
Re: "All" movie player drops frames

Show done, and it worked great in general, and fairly well regarding the QC playback. Thanks for problem solving every half year I rush into the forum...

I just want to recap on some experiences made during this proses: The project was to fire off 60 fractal animation videoclips in stereoscopic 3D over 4 projectors and tune playback speed to a philharmonic orchestra .

I found Kineme video tools not to work well in my situation, with a resolution of 1920 x 1536. I never got anything to play better than 16-20 frames per second. Also, I found feeding the right file path for triggering a bit awkward. On the other hand it seems Photo-JPG works for it just as well as Mjpg. PNG and Animation was down to 5 fps.

002 played back nicely, but triggering was slow, and changing speed stalled playback totally.

So I ended up with the stock movie loader: It performed well with prores as long as it was just connected to a stopwatch or patch time. Anytime it looped, or I feed it a signal from integrator or similar, it would not play back well, but drop to 15-20 fps

But I found a curious work-around: Tweaking playback speed, then resetting, would play back 30 fps smoothly (for a while…)

So I made a timeline comp that would momentarily speed up, then reset automatically after each triggering.

Then I had to repeatedly do rapid adjustments to synchronize with the orchestra, then hit reset to play back smooth.

Syphon worked extremely well letting me feed Left eye video to another comp, thus running 4 projectors over two Matrox cards. The R and L eye video was in perfect sync as long as the comps were playing 30 fps.

I really would like to work for a better solution regarding playback. I am at 15% cpu while running so I do not think think is a hardware issue

If anyone wants files for testing, please tell.

Here is teaser for the project: http://www.musicsalesclassical.com/News/2587

Uploading 3D versions later.

Thanks, Boya

gtoledo3's picture
Re: "All" movie player drops frames

edit:mixed up two threads

vade's picture
Re: "All" movie player drops frames

Just FYI CPU is not the metric you want to look at when determining HD or equivalent playback issues. It is disk throughput (seek time, bandwidth) that is the culprit in 99% of the cases.

boya's picture
Re: "All" movie player drops frames

Yes, I get that, but the SSD throughput works fine with three files to QT @30fps, simultaneously. So I think it´s software.

Just have to say I appreciate your work. - I´m also using the FCP Syphon plugin to edit 3D right from timeline straight to 6 projectors on stage. Nice experience! Hope you port it to fcpx whenever I switch over.