HELP! Painfully slow clip playback!

[fallengrace01]

Hello, I've posted before on the resolume Avenue 3 forum, and thought that downgrading might fix this problem,

However

I AM GETTING ABSOLUTLEY HORRIBLE PLAYBACK FPS!!!! How do i fix this!!! i've tried everything!

So, i am running a
DELL XPS M1530, 2.2 GHZ Core 2 DU0,
XP SP3, 4 gig RAM, 160 GIG internal 7200 RPM HDD,
and the clips are running off a 750 gig 7200 SEAGATE FREEAGENT PRO,
alongside a Geforce 8600 GT Graphics card.

The clips are encoded with PIC Video at 768 x 520, Resolume is running in 16 BIT, with preview at 768 x 520, and output at 800 x 600.

With 1 layer running i am getting 30 fps on average,
with 2 layers it drops to about 15-20 fps
and with 3 layers and very few blending modes it drops to a 6-7 FPS! What the +$#@$@#$#@$@#$
That is just horribly slow!!!!!

Now i've turned off Anti-Virus, tried a fresh install of XP, and stopped nearly all startup applications (Running about 39 processes at Max)

HOW DO I FIX THIS? Is this normal for a system with these specs? Because that just seems terrible!

Please someone help, or any advice, because its driving me mad...

Cheers anyone and everyone, anything is very much appreciated...

[Rene]

fallengrace01, I'm not a (hardware) expert, but I think that's normal for a system with these specs. And the things you are doing

I experienced similar things with R3 on a Vista machine. Big PICVideo files (800MB up to 1.1GB per file) from one disk. But had no time to investigate that...

Is the Seagate drive external (USB, Firewire or eSATA) or internal. I think this could be one of the reasons. - Also serving 3 files (big? and fragmented?) from one disk could be a bottle neck. Have you tried to put at least one Layer (e.g. files played at 3rd layer) to the other disk? Maybe this helps?

"encoded with PIC Video at 768 x 520" "and output at 800 x 600." - it's recommended to encode footage at output resolution. (as resizing needs CPU power, you might miss at some other place)

[fallengrace01]

Hello there

Cheers for the swift reply

As of the moment im running all the clips from the External HDD (Seagate freeagent pro) Through 6 pin to 4 pin firewire, however i have tested running the clips from the 7200 rpm internal HDD and it produces the same slow FPS.

However a recent development is - I've just tried the same setup on a friends laptop, similar, 2.4 Ghz, 2 gig Ram, 9500 Geforce GFX card, trying resolume 2.4 and 3, I got the similar effect of the clips slowing down after a short period, however i forgot to install the PICVIDEO codec, after installing this everything seemed to be running perfectly

Now i've installed the PICVIDEO on mine in order to compress the files in the first place, but is there someway that the codec is being bypassed? or conflicting with some of the editing programs on my system? E.G Avid, After Effects, 3DS MAX or something?

Cheers!

[gpvillamil]

Get the G-Spot Code Information Appliance (http://www.headbands.com/gspot/), that will tell you what codecs are actually being used to play your clips.

I found that if I had ffdshow installed, for example, that it would override the PicVideo codec for playback. ffdshow is a great set of codecs, but it has post-processing enabled by default, since it makes movies look nicer. However, this really slows down decoding too. You can configure ffdshow to NOT decode MJPEGs, and then PicVideo should take over.

Another thing to check is to turn OFF advanced deblocking in the PicVideo decoder, that can really slow things down as well.

Finally, it is possible that other directshow filters may be invoked when you play back an AVI, eg. subtitle, postprocessor, etc. These will turn up in the G-Spot listing. If audio is included in the clips, directshow will try to initialize the audio codec, even if Resolume doesn't use it. So if you have additional audio filters defined, those might be starting up.

Good luck. You should be able to get better rates than you are getting.