Why is my LFO lagging as Stuttering? (kind of urgent)

Beginners
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1

Can someone please look at my file and see why the transition from each image is lagging?
It’s a pointcloud visual that uses images and their depthmaps and it transitions between each image through the LFO, but the LFO keeps lagging and makes the transition hiccup and pause for like 0.2 seconds.
(you might have to edit the folder path for the 2 Folder DATs on the left. I’ve added the folder of the images in the ZIP file.)

Thanks in advance!

2

Hi @sq0815,

the computer is just struggeling to open and load the files in time. Responsible for the hang is the “Frame Read Timeout” parameter of the Movie Fiel In TOP. Currently set to the default 10000 msec TouchDesigner will wait that long for a frame from the hard drive before giving up. In case of the pointclouds you are loading, loading and decoding the frames takes a while.
You could just lower that parameter to something like 10 msec and prevent the stutter while risking that frames might not yet be loaded when they are needed downstream.

Ideally you would employ a preloading/unloading routine to make sure images are loaded before being displayed.

You could also try to load the whole folder into a Point File In TOP (instead of specifying an image file path, just specify the folder) and control playback via the Specify Index Mode stepping forward the “Index” parameter. Benefit here is that it takes care of preloading frames in the background as specified in the “Pre-Read Frames” parameter on the Tune page.

Hope this helps
Markus

PS: great looking pointclouds!

3

The 10 msec solution seems to work for me thank you so much!
As for the your ‘load whole folder into a point file in top’ approach, I don’t think I fully follow.
Do you mean directly dropping all the 180 images from the folder into the TD file as tops?

4

Hi @sq0815,

sorry if this was a bit vague. You can specify a Folder in the File parameter and the operator will then interpret each asset in the folder as a single frame making it possible to step through a folder with just a MovieFileIn TOP (as in the attached example) or a PointFileIn TOP as in your case.

cheers
Markus
base_folderLoadingExample.tox (1.7 KB)