Autopilot Drifting Out of Sync over long duration

[Wasko]

Hi everyone,

I'm using the most recent update of R7. I have some long term / unmanned outdoor projection installs that run automatic sequences using autopilot. These sometimes include multiple layers that are intended to sync'd together. An example is for our Holiday show we have a background on Layer 1, and a spout input on Layer 2 displaying a Christmas countdown.

When autopiloting through several clips spanning multiple layers, the auto pilot slowly drifts out of sync even though all settings are correct. I've quadruple checked that all clip durations and transition times are completely identical across all layers that are intended to cue up together in the sequence.

This only seems to be an issue when trying to sync a source (spout, etc) with a video clip. A video clip stacked with a video clip will stay on sync, a source stacked on a video clip will not. The difference in timing seems to be very, very small - so that the drift only becomes very apparent after several hours of looping through the sequence.

I should also add that when you add decimals to the equation - if the above mentioned spout input is set to a clip duration of 60.08 to match a video of the same length below it - it simply doesn't seem to work. The autopilot will not sync with manually set durations that contain decimal places on source layers like spout. To remedy this, I've been rounding up or down a video clips duration so that it's an integer (60.03 to 60). This makes it work slightly better short term, but it still drifts over time as mentioned above.

This seems very minor, but it's a feature I use often to make sequences for long term outdoor projection installs.

Edit: This seems to be an issue of milliseconds when video is loaded (even on SSD DXV) vs spout sources which is instantaneous. Setting to BPM sync seems to have been a bit of a band-aid.

It would be nice for autopilot to have a feature such as "Launch with clip below" which would resolve this issue and ensure sync.

Any idea why I may be experiencing this?

Edit: This seems to be an issue of milliseconds when the clip is loaded (even on SSD, DXV) where the spout source is instantaneous and the video adds +1 milliseconds each cycle, etc.

It would be nice to have an autopilot feature such as "launch with clip below" which would resolve this issue and ensure sync.

[elgarf]

Hi,

Try to add audio to the source.
Clips without audio somehow not perfectly in sync. You can copy clip with video and audio parts, and replace video to spout source. Then two clips should be 100% synced.

[Zoltán]

Video clips have their own timelines, with discrete frames to display. With nominal speed playback, a 30 FPS clip should be quite good aligned to 60FPS render passes.

Sources have times set in seconds, and the auto pilot will fire when the time has reached it's end on a source clip. This may or may not be aligned to render passes, and a render pass takes 1/60 second @ 60 FPS. So when a spout clip reaches it's end in the middle of a Renderpass, you'll only see it fire/advance to next clip on the next pass. So you might see a drift of up to 1/60 seconds with every auto pilot trigger.

Resolume doesn't render at a fixed frame rate, a lot depends on the loads, so the alignment will vary with that too.

Layer Auto pilot is not designed to run clips in different layers in sync. Column Auto pilot in the feature request section is about that.