I’ve just been doing some testing with the Ableton sync project ran into a couple of difficulties.
I attempted to play 6 movies and specify their index with a transport _ramp and found I couldn’t really play more than 3 with the TD frame rate coming to a halt. I thought it might be their codec because they are all H.264 so I decided to convert them to an uncompressed format and see if that would help. I converted the 6 avi’s to uncompressed and dropped them in the project and no video would display or come out the Moviein TOP. I usually don’t use avi’s so I thought maybe TD doesn’t support uncompressed AVI so then I converted them to uncompressed .mov’s. I dropped them into TD and bam the program crashes instantly no attempt to save file dialog. I then switched the codec library in the preferences from LIBAVCODEC to quicktime and the .mov’s then played and didn’t cause a crash. Malcolm said I should use the LIBAVCODEC library for stability? To keep my CPU use down I would like to run uncompressed avi’s shouldn’t they work with the LIBAVCODEC?
Uncompressed .avis is a known issue. Can you send me a sample .mov file? That shouldn’t crash.
You could also try something like animation codec which we’ve used a lot.
Yes you want to use libavcodec, using quicktime will be much slower when running 6 movies because apple cripples the windows quicktime to only 1 thread working at a time.
So you think I should use animation codec with .mov or avi (is there such thing as animation codec for avi?) and is the animation codec heavy on the CPU?
I remember a couple of years trying to use the animation codec in Adobe Premier and having a lot of problems with the computer chugging (I think though that might have been a few files playing back on only 1 7200 rpm drive I can’t remember though)
I was thinking the other day that I might know why I have all theses problems playing back movies on my two machines. I have a Blackmagic Design Decklink card that I installed in the first machine and then took it out and put it in the other. I’m pretty sure that when I install the driver software it installs some Blackmagic codecs.
Could it be possible that these codecs are somehow messing up the codec libraries? I was planning on taking out the Decklink anyways and replacing it with the Nvidia SDI capture card. Is there a way to delete all my codecs and then reload them from scratch?
Also I’ll email you a link of one of the .mov’s (there quite big 180 mb 5 sec file)
They would be .mov files. Animation codec is lighter on the CPU than a heavier compressed format like H264 or MJPEG. Reading two animation codec files off a HDD won’t likely work though because the seek time as it moves between the two files will kill your performance. The size of the files matters too since they can tend to eat up a lot of the bandwidth of a a HDD or SSD.
No, the blackmagic card isn’t the cause of any codec issues. Installed codecs have no effect on TD as all of our codecs are built in. (Unless you are using Quicktime I guess?)
Ok I’ve fixed it so uncompressed .avi files are now read correctly in the Movie In TOP.
However, I still think you should be using Animation codec to reduce your HDD bandwidth requirements instead of uncompressed video stream. Fix will be in build 17060 or later.
Sounds great. Soon I’ll do some tests comparing animation, photo-jpeg, and uncompressed file formats. To see the load on the cpu’s/SSD’s. When there done I’ll post the results.