Is it possible to 'lock' the playback frame rate?

[Martini77]

Hi - I wonder if you can help me...

I am working with a band who have Arena running on a MBPro with a very basic set up: they are triggering from stage to a projector (HDMI to DVI), one clip at a time; each clip is 3-5mins in duration.

All their clips are 1920 x 1080 25fps ProResHQ. The clips play faultlessly through QT from the internal SSD, with no frames dropped.

The Arena FPS counter is reading either 50 or 60, depending on the frequency set at the projector, so I'm assuming there is a lot of pre-processing going on, to provide a robust environment within Arena for those who are working with a variety of frame rates within a single composition.

Even with the projector set at 50Hz (which prompts the Arena fps counter to 50) there are occasional slips and catch-ups from 50fps, along with motion defects happening in non-repeatable sections of the clip. For example, there's one shot on a ferris wheel, so there's lots of horizontal and vertical motion as various stanchions pass by; these do not flow smoothly as they do during QT Player playback.

Is there any way to force Arena to playback at the native frame rate of the clips - in this case 25fps?

thanks
Martin

[Zoltán]

you can't lock the frame rate to 25, unless you have a display that runs at 25 FPS, but also then it is a cap instead of a lock.
are you playing h246 or DXV videos?
which macbook pro do you have iris / nvidia / ati ?

[Martini77]

Hi - thanks for your reply. Clips are ProResHQ. I will try a test transcode to DXV (a codec I'm only superficially familiar with) but ideally I want to avoid transcoding since there's a lot of material and the quality will only diminish.

I don't have the laptop here but I've asked them for graphics card specs and will post asap.
thanks
M

[Martini77]

The MacBook Pro is Retina 15" mid 2015
Intel Iris Pro 1536MB

[francoe]

I see two ways: use quicktime to play those videos (or any simple player), or transcode it to DXV.
A 1080 Prores will stutter over resolume no matters wich frequency you are working on.
The fact is you're trying to plug a cpu.based video compression on a gpu.based media server, that means a massive overhead. Your best bet is reencode to dxv, if you have a lot of storage you can use the HQ mode.

[Oaktown]

Clips are ProResHQ.

ProRes is a huge memory hog with Resolume and you'll quickly end up running out of memory so do yourself a favor and convert all your movies to DXV3.

[Martini77]

Thanks very much for your replies. I will transcode to DXV3 and report back.