TroikaTronix Forum: Isadora: Performance: fighting the glitch


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fighting the glitch

v23
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Apr 17, 2007, 12:13 PM

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fighting the glitch	Can't Post

Hi,

I just ran a show with a shuttle sb81p pc (0.9b41) with four screens via a TH2Go and the main screen for the fourth output.
Resolution 320x240. SATA RAID 0. 2 Gb of RAM and and a 3,2 Ghz Pentium IV.

I mostly just sent one movie to two or four 3D rect proyectors. And still so, the glitches are just very noticable. Preload doesn't help, because it just produces a stutter when you trigger the preload. As a workaround I had all the videos - up to four - running in the background from the beginning of each scene and just faded into them when needed, disabling the ones I would use anymore to improve framerate.

Anyway, the playback isn't very smooth either even when framerates show as 24,9. So slow clouds flying by always have a small jitter. I am aware this is a Quicktime prob.

So my question would be if we will get away from quicktime or if izzi is just too much depended on it? Are you planning on native avi support...? Maybe it's a stupid question, I don't know much about programming.

After the gig I took the same Shuttle and compared its performance with Arkaos and there where no glitches at all unless you hit a lot of keys in a row. Naturally, it's not a node based software and therefore rather limiting for my needs. But I would like to be able to use izzi as a mediaserver for running a straight-forward show too.

How do others deal with this? Can you actually get the glitch down to almost nothing? Is it less on Macs?

Keep up the great, wonderfull project Mark...
v23/Henrik
www.videodesign.es

Mark Coniglio
TroikaTronix / Moderator

Apr 18, 2007, 11:53 AM

Post #2 of 14 (4673 views)
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Re: [v23] fighting the glitch [In reply to]	Can't Post

Quote

Anyway, the playback isn't very smooth either even when framerates show as 24,9. So slow clouds flying by always have a small jitter. I am aware this is a Quicktime prob.

Hmmm... this is surprising to me with such fast machine and using 320x240 movies. But not completely unheard of

Quote

So my question would be if we will get away from quicktime or if izzi is just too much depended on it? Are you planning on native avi support...? Maybe it's a stupid question, I don't know much about programming.

I actually have this in an in-house version, i.e., direct WMV and AVI playback native to Windows. Once you get past the Movie Playback portion of Isadora, the rest is _not_ very dependent on QuickTime. Howver, there are a number of compatibility problems with existing features; for instance, under the Windows DirectX programming API, you can't loop movies nearly as nicely as in QuickTime. This means that some of the looping things _cant't_ work in the same way. Making this consistent across platforms is important.

Another thing will be to add "multi-threading" support to different parts of the program and to change the way Isadora plays clips to a "pull model". (If you don't know what I mean, not worth explaining.) I am interviewing programmers now, to find help to handle the many tasks that need taking care of.

Quote

After the gig I took the same Shuttle and compared its performance with Arkaos and there where no glitches at all unless you hit a lot of keys in a row. Naturally, it's not a node based software and therefore rather limiting for my needs. But I would like to be able to use izzi as a mediaserver for running a straight-forward show too.

All I can say is, I'm gearing up to delegate some of the many many responsibilities at TroikaTronix, because I can't keep up any more as one person. I am committed to addressing the issues, becasue I know they exist. But it is going to be incremental, as it will take time to make all of this happen.

But perhaps other PC users have information to share? I know that many people are using it happily....

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Mark Coniglio / TroikaTronix
Creator of Isadora

v23
Novice

Apr 19, 2007, 3:47 PM

Post #3 of 14 (4645 views)
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Re: [v23] fighting the glitch [In reply to]	Can't Post

thanxx

yepp, more feedback and different Pc-User experiences would be highly appreciated...

compuguruman
New User

Apr 21, 2007, 6:34 AM

Post #4 of 14 (4609 views)
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Re: [v23] fighting the glitch [In reply to]	Can't Post

I've run Isadora on a few generations of PC hardware. I've had various issues, but they're all worked out now. I would suggest that you convert all your video to quicktime .mov, photo jpeg compression. I've heard that motion jpeg is a good compression for Isadora as well, but I've had best results with Photo Jpeg. Movies play backwards and forwards with equal smoothness. Photo Jpeg is an inefficient compression in terms of size so your files will be bigger. Make sure that hardware accelerated rendering is turned on. Another thing you might want to play around with is the sleep timer setting (in preferences). I think this was fixed at some version, but I used to have a big problem where movies would hitch and it seemed to be related to the on-screen controls. I turned my sleep timer way up (100ms) and this fixed that problem completely. This doesn't seem to be the case anymore, but you might want to try setting the sleep timer higher. I would think that you should be able to play 4 movies at that low resolution without a problem if your just fading between them.

http://www.pakapaka.org

v23
Novice

Apr 23, 2007, 12:41 PM

Post #5 of 14 (4560 views)
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Re: [compuguruman] fighting the glitch [In reply to]	Can't Post

thanks
I've tried it all and am actually working with mjpeg movs. Anybody running really smooth on pc?

mister creosote
Novice

May 7, 2007, 7:04 PM

Post #6 of 14 (4292 views)
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I only get the glitch on startup. I'm using a Dell Inspirion 9300 with a gig of ram, etc, and I'm running all my video files (between 500mb and 2 gigs) from a USB2 drive. Once I get going, everything seems okay-- I'm using really basic patches tho.

Aolis
Novice

May 10, 2007, 1:22 PM

Post #7 of 14 (4230 views)
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Re: [v23] fighting the glitch [In reply to]	Can't Post

Hello all,

As for PC experience goes I haven't had much luck with video myself.

I have been trying to use Isadora in a simple 1 screen Video Fade Up - Video Fade Down with one Slider to control the speed of the video to help keep it in sync with live music.

I have tried running Isadora on two different PC lap tops and have yet to find a way to get rid of the 'glitch'.

Laptop 1 = Intel P4 3.2 GHz, 2 GB Ram, 800 MHz FSBx2, 7200 RPM HDD, ATI Radeon Mobility 9700, Win XP SP1

Laptop 2 = Intel 2.33 Core Duo, 4 GB Ram, 644 MHz FSBx2, 7200 RPM HDD, Nvidia 7400 250mb Turbo Cache, Win XP SP2

My projector only goes down to 800x600 and I have found that by encoding the video at half the projectors resolution (400x300) using the Photo JPEG codec and running in Direct Mode I get close to smooth performance. (Smoother then when the video is encoded at 320x240) However when ever their is quick movement in the video there is lots of jerking and jumping.

I have also found that by using the "Movie Player Direct" actor I get the best results, though effecting the speed at all seems to introduce glitch. Also I don't know how to fade the video in and out without using the "Projector" actor so I haven't really tried using this as an option.

I have tried to use external HDD's to store my video clips. Both USB 2.0 and Firewire...Firewire seemed to give better results...though the performance seemed very inconsistent. Sometimes it seems as though it is working better on the external, other times it seems to be faster off the internal laptop HDD...even when using the same video clips and patch.

The only other thing that I can think that I have played with has been loading the video into RAM. While this does seem to help, again it doesn't eliminate the glitch.

I know this doesn't help exactly, but I too am interested to hear from people who have Isadora running smoothly on PC. What hardware do you use? Any one getting smooth video on a laptop?

How important are the specs of a systems video card to making Isadora run smooth?

Cheers,

-Alex

:.rux:.
Novice

Jun 1, 2007, 2:13 AM

Post #8 of 14 (4070 views)
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fighting the glitch [In reply to]	Can't Post

having the same problems..
mypatches work great on my mac, when switching over to pc (with a more powerfull processor, 10k rpm hd's and 2gb ram)... it sucks!
everytime i switch to a new clip, there the glitch/lag.. unusable.
tried preloading to ram, reduces a bit but still unusable.
the worst is that i'm using 320*240 res.. not even vga.
cleaned up the patch, remade it, even just using 2movieplayers and one effect each , same behaviour.
other softwares run quite fast on the same machine...
the funny thing is that from 2004 to 2006 i used my patches on pc without any problems, now isadora on pc became unusable???
_____________ ____________ _________ _____ ___ __ _ _
http://www.rux-werx-here.essaycollective.org

william
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Jun 1, 2007, 10:53 PM

Post #9 of 14 (4057 views)
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Regarding the scene to scene glitch [which is what I think some of you are referring to] - I've opted to build the crossfades manually and within the same scene whenever possible. This is done using envelope generators and some well timed triggers. I've built a variety of user actors to facilitate this crossfading, instead of using the built in crossfader actor, for more control over my cueing.

Similar to what you described, Henrik -- the last show I created had every cue within one scene to maintain the smoothest crossfades, but this required stacking user actors within user actors and init'ing everything to start off and triggering each cue one by one via a control panel. It's important that once the crossfade elapses to also have the videos turn off and any related actors cease activity, as well.

I find that referencing my source files from the local harddrive is the best way to maintain a high fps. I've never used an external HD without noticing a lag. It gets particularly worse when referencing more than one video as well, since the datastream through a firewire cable is limited.

As for fighting the PC glitch --

...yes, the Mac is faster. I've designed one show on a PC and I found several elements of the program to be less effective. However, there are ways to work around the limitations of PC architecture, since that is what is largely responsible. A big help is to turn off alot of the CPU wasting display settings on a PC. Revert the display settings to classic and disable as many of the processes running in the background. This speeds things up considerably.

Is there any reason you can't just use the regular "Projector" actor and not the 3D Rect Projectors? I switched from the Rect Projects after finding that all of those 3D renderers within the actor weren't always needed and that the standard projector actor has quite a bit of functionality. I'm not sure if the 3D projector slows the CPU more than the regular actor, but that would also be a suggestion -- try 4 regular projectors.

One final suggestion - I found that on the PC the codec JPEG2000 actually ran smoother than the PhotoJPEG (which works like butter on the MAC).

(This post was edited by boys&murderers on Jun 5, 2007, 10:58 PM)

v23
Novice

Jun 2, 2007, 2:05 AM

Post #10 of 14 (4050 views)
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Re: [boys&murderers] fighting the glitch [In reply to]	Can't Post

hi
I will definetly try the JPG2000.

Do you use a laptop and in that case 5400 or 7200 rpm harddisks?

Anybody else has experiences with external HDs?

Mark Coniglio
TroikaTronix / Moderator

Jun 4, 2007, 3:17 PM

Post #11 of 14 (4019 views)
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Please report on JPEG 2000 performance. This is one of the slowest on the Mac -- I'm surprised to hear it's fast on a PC.

Best,
Mark

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Mark Coniglio / TroikaTronix
Creator of Isadora

william
User

Jun 4, 2007, 4:22 PM

Post #12 of 14 (4017 views)
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Re: [Mark Coniglio] fighting the glitch [In reply to]	Can't Post

It's actually funny how it happened - I encoded the files as JPEG2000 accidently (editing in a rush and confusing the two codecs) and loaded them on the PC to test the files and found them to work (surprisingly) better than the PhotoJPEG codec files I had made previously. I compared the two side by side and noticed a significant difference in smoothness.

However, there was a lag in the audio and I had to implement a 3 frame video delay to sync sound w/video.

The show was running on an Intel Core Duo 1.86 Ghz Processor with 2Gb RAM and an nVidia Quatro 3450 graphics card. We were running XP (Media Edition, I believe). It was a Dell tower (I didn't have a choice).

And again -- whenever using a PC, it is absolutely crucial to turn off all of the XP display setting and revert to classic view in the control panel. It will look like Windows 98.

(This post was edited by boys&murderers on Jun 5, 2007, 10:58 PM)

knowtheatre
New User

Jan 27, 2008, 1:34 PM

Post #13 of 14 (2526 views)
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Re: [boys&murderers] fighting the glitch [In reply to]	Can't Post

In Reply To

Regarding the scene to scene glitch [which is what I think some of you are referring to] -

I think I may be seeing this glitch, but I can't imagine why; I'm only running the movie player for sound...
I'm seeing the beach ball if the computer has been sitting idle for 15 minutes or so, and I attempt to jump to the next scene. When it does finally jump to the next scene, the position marker is moving, but I'm not getting output. Simply clicking on the sound output options tab will then bring up the audio, starting from the "start" position. Anybody have any ideas?
I'm running a G4, 1.5 Gigs of ram, nothing else is running, and no crazy filters. Would it help to load these into the ram? Turning up the sleep timer? Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
Thanks!

Mark Coniglio
TroikaTronix / Moderator

Feb 4, 2008, 4:51 AM

Post #14 of 14 (2276 views)
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I just want to add to this thread that my current main focus is to improve the stability of frame rates when Isadora renders, especially on the PC. There will be important improvements in this regard on the next release.

Best Wishes,
Mark

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Mark Coniglio / TroikaTronix
Creator of Isadora

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