I am looking for compact computers for an upcoming 6 week art show that will be doing mainly 3D video playback from touch designer to multiple projectors. I need to run continuously for days on end ideally. I searched the forum and noted some of the loop playback issues on Mac Studio in forum which appears to be solved with experimental build, but I would like to stick with 2022.33910 build if possible.
I am wondering how Mac Studio users are liking them generally for touch designer work? I don’t need Kinect or other features that don’t work on Mac for this show necessarily. I use mainly a home built ASUS motherboard i9 GTX4080 PC and MSI laptop for most of my touch designer work. But in testing my Mac Air laptop is talking smoother with my Epson 3800 3D projector than the MSI/Win 10 64 laptop. Some sort of HDMI/HDCP issues perhaps. I don’t want to use my big Studio PC for the show or the older much weaker MSI or Mac Air laptops.
How do you Mac Studio users like it as a general show machine? Any advice appreciated.
I have always had excellent reliability with my various Macs over the years personally…
I am also considering Mac Mini2 Pro for my show which would also need to run 24/7 for 6 weeks continuously. Bit concerned about thermal throttling. Any experience with long term shows using Mac Mini? Do you know what might be the closest small form factor PC/Win64/nVidia graphics based solution? I am hoping to get something small and light enough to hang up from the ceiling with the projectors to avoid long video/audio cable runs…
Thanks for that, looking into why this is. The Mac Mini shouldn’t thermal throttle from what I’ve read, but i guess it depends on what you are running on it.
Anything running 24/7 for weeks can be problematic, its probably worth trying to schedule a restart at least once a week. If you can’t, don’t use timers things that count forever, this can cause issues. I recommend running a test before signing off on something that will run that long.
Sorry, I’m not familiar with any Nvidia based SFF devices, there used to be the Intel NUC Phantom Canyon lineup but they have been discontinued.
@ben OK thanks Ben. I am going to try to use SudoMagic from Matthew Ragan to do some remote monitoring and control via internet from home if all goes well. Otherwise I could certainly do a manual weekly restart. I will definitely test the hell out of it once I have a final config that works. I guess I could try some long term runs with my Mac Air M1 with TD while I figure this out…
I have a Mac Studio and has been very reliable so far. Only some Vulkan errors when I choose the wrong value on a taxing parameter.
I ran into issues playing back several videos at the same time (4+ in 4K). I had frame drops when adding more videos to play back, resolution wasn’t really affecting the playback so I think it was the codec. I’ve read here that it’s best practice to encode the videos you will play from, TD in Hap, HapQ or NotchLC to optimice the playback.
Be aware that Studio has a limit on how many external screens you can use, I think it’s 4 for the M1 Max?, so if you want to have more you’d need another machine. It is possible to sync videos playing in different machines, if that’s a requirement (Trigger to reset playback and send same trigger over OSC out CHOP with an RJ45 between machines).