High-Res DXVs on TripleHead

[pw144]

Hello there,

I've been trying to make the most of a TripleHead2Go with DXV Quicktimes Recently, but am having trouble getting smooth playback.

(Despite FPS staying above 40fps most of the time)

The larger outputs I'm going for, with Composition size following DVI Output size, are not hitting the the CPU that much, but I'm wondering if the Video Card or the HardDrive are having trouble keeping up.

For example - at 3840 x 768 my 5 minute files are around 8 gigabytes,
The will play smoothly at times but then although the FPS still looks healthy, the video starts stuttering.


System:
Windows 7 Pro
Resolume 3.2
Dell XPS M1730
Striped Hard Drives
Nvidia 9800M x2 -- Compatibility Mode turned On. (Tried it off)
Analogue TripleHead2Go
Video blending Modes: Off

Has anyone made breakthroughs with this?

[mfo]

Sometimes I would also like to have some helper, to find out what is the bottle neck - HD, cpu or graphics card.

[sleepytom]

I would suggest that you replace one of your drives with an SSD for your video to play from. This will be a lot faster than the current raid setup.

Also make sure you minimise background processes and run as few other apps as possible. I had a bad experience with adobe updater trying to download updates in the middle of a show. My own fault but it made me aware of how sensitve resolume is to other apps running. Antivirus should be turned off too during shows, and go for aminimal antivirus such as avast free rather than a massive bloatware like norton.

how much system ram do you have - more never hurts!

I've found long clip performance to be variable, sometimes i can play 10 min clips fine, other times i get some jitter / frame drop (which doesn't always see the FPS counter fall), I tend to assume this is hard drive access issues as DXV is quite high datarate and so is pushing the drives harder than other codecs. If it were a GPU issue then i'd expect to the the FPS counter drop, however openGL can draw to screen as fast as it likes but if the HDD cannot give it the next frame in time then the video will stutter regardless of how well openGL is coping.

[edwin]

When using DXV files the bottleneck would be the HD. When using a lot of layers with hi-res footage the VRAM might become a problem. But first off all you need a fast HD. The cpu you can monitor and there are also tools that can monitor the disk access. HD Tune Pro can be used on Windows, there is a trial version you can use.
http://www.hdtune.com/

[pw144]

@ Tom
- Thanks, yep would an SSD always be internal? Can I firewire one in?
- I have no antivirus onboard yet.
- Regarding other processes, Is it dangerous to set Avenue to a higher priority?
- I have 6 GB ram
- Yes I suspect you're right about datarate. The DXVs are massive in both framesize and storage.


@edwin
Thanks I'll take a look at that app

[pw144]

I'm seeing from other threads that it may be possible to PCI-express one in....

[pw144]

or maybe I can grow a e-Sata port via PCI-e
and then plug an external SSD into that?
Blah Blah Blah

[mfo]

SSD via express card slot (internally: pci express) can be a fine option. Its fast, reliable and no adapters/cables are needed. With such a thing, you can even try to "intelligently" place your clips. Lets say: you have 3 clips you usually play together - than place 2 on the SSD and the third on the internal HD. I'm thinking about this one:
http://www.amazon.de/Verbatim-SSD-Expre ... y_pc_img_a

Edwin, thanks for the link to HD Tune!

Also I want to note, that on my 3 years old Asus Notebook with a 7200rpm HD and just 1,5GB ram I still can play 2 dxv clips in 1920*480. Without any stutter! Just with a 3rd clip coming in, the framerate drops (Resolume still shows 30fps, but I can see it stutter).