VJ gig problems last night

[EazyTom]

I had a VJ gig last night and encountered some problems with Avenue 4.1.11 (registered version). I looked for these on the forums but no luck. These all happened separately and after I had shutdown all open applications except for Avenue. In some cases these happened after a full system reset and only starting Avenue. I was using 5 layers all running DXV optimized format vids or HD stills.

System: 2014 MacBook Pro (Yosemite) with 16GB of memory and all SSD, using built-in HDMI out and APC40-mkII controller

1. Using Mask50 blend setting on the top layer with intense white/black lines to create mask over composition, when switching to another clip it would sometimes slow down the video WAY down and kind of chug so while it is easing into the transition. Once it is done transitioning it runs fine again, but given the other crashes I was very nervous during this time and it did look horrible on the main output screen.

2. Twice when using the crossfader and also using dashboard knobs together I encountered an "output freeze" where the output was frozen but I had full OS control, Avenue was not responding to any clicks. I had to force kill Avenue and restart to recover.

3. Some of the my Mask50 clips on my top layer stopped working, no effect when fired and no A/B setting or layer blending issue, it just would not play. After some of the crashes I would play this clip and it would work fine.

4. Both times after restarting the app I had the Cmd-Shift-D issue (now I know how to fix it) but it caused me to have to use the main club projector to show my desktop so I could mouse over and drag the app on the laptop screen. It seemed to prefer whatever my "Display 1" was set to when displaying the Avenue application instead of the laptop screen. It happened twice so I felt really unprofessional after all of this.

Does anyone have any tips for preparing your VJ sets for live performance? I come from an Ableton live performance background so I know there can be a lot to preparing for a set that solves some issues ahead of time. Like rebooting from scratch before you start a long show, turning off virus scans, disabling wifi, etc. Anything else?

Thank you for any advice, have a nice day!

[Zoltán]

what file format are those HD stills, and what resolution?

[EazyTom]

Hmm the stills were JPG and PNG format and were either 1080 or 2K in size and scaled down to fit into the Output screen with other videos. Most of the DXVs are 720p or 1080 vids from the Resolume Footage page.

[Oaktown]

How many jpg and png files per deck?

[EazyTom]

I would say only 1 still JPG or PNG per deck, typically I download HD artwork (nothing more than 3000pix wide) and scale it down to be used as a texture for vids to play using blend mode of Add50 for most layers.

[Oaktown]

Your laptop should be able to run what you're describing no problems so that's weird!

Are all your media files on your main drive? Try moving all the artwork into one folder and locate under Applications>Resolume Avenue 4.1.11>media to see if it makes any difference.

How big is your composition in pixels?

Try scaling down your stills to the size of your comp to see if it makes any difference.

Why don't you uninstall Resolume and reinstall it. I personally use http://www.appzapper.com/ to uninstall software on my mac and it seems to work great.

[Zoltán]

1-3 .
your video output freeze sounds a lot like what I had encountered with big resolution file (4096x1080), that was reaching the capabilities of my video cards texture handling. (I think)
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=11453
video playback was not possible, but audio files played fine in all but the layer where the large res file was launched.
and when it didn't cause a freeze, on launching and transitioning I saw about 30% fps drops too.

anyway, resampling the file to a lower resolution fixed this for me.

what video card does your macbook have?

[Oaktown]

System: 2014 MacBook Pro (Yosemite) with 16GB of memory and all SSD, using built-in HDMI out and APC40-mkII controller

I just realized I forgot to ask you a very important question:

Does your Macbook Pro have both the Intel Iris Pro 5200 and the Nvidia GeForce GT 750M GPU or just the Intel Iris Pro 5200?

If you your MacBook Pro only has the Intel Iris Pro 5200, that's probably the issue and unfortunately there is nothing much you can do about it!