Mouse scrolling and QuickTime issues

[aerolis]

This is my first post on this forum. These issues or bugs are related to the Windows platform. None of these problems exists on the Mac version of DP as far as I know.

I’ve been demoing DP8 on Windows 7 64-bit for the last two weeks and I’m loving it so far. It’s a fantastic DAW. I mainly score to film and the DPs workflow for this is amazing.

Initially I had some minor issues, but the MOTUnation forum was very helpful in solving them. Still there are a few quirks that I’ve haven’t been able to figure out. Mainly three issues. Two of them are in relation to the mouse wheel scrolling function in DP8:


1.
I would like to advance a single frame whenever I’m scroll-wheeling on the frame counter in the Transport. But on Windows it scrolls 12 frames for each step on the scroll wheel, which is quite inaccurate. The same goes for seconds, minutes and hours - 12 units for all of them on each scroll step. The “scroll sensitivity” seems to be too high in DP for Windows. I have heard that single frame scrolling is possible on the Mac version of DP, still I’m not able to do this in Windows 7. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to a Mac right now for direct comparison.

I know about the left and right arrow shortcuts which you can use after you left click the Movie Window. These shortcuts are great when you have the movie imported into DP. The story is a little different when slaving video to another computer, which is my primary setup. These shortcuts doesn’t work when I’m slaving video to another PC, the slave doesn’t react to the arrow keys in the movie window. The navigation with left/right arrow keys in the Movie Window is clearly not transmitted via MTC to the slave. I also tried MMC but no luck there. MMC in DP seems to be aimed more towards syncing up with MMC devices rather than slaving video to another computer. But on the bright side frame scrolling in the Transport counter is transmitted instantly through MTC, and could be a good temporary solution, as the slave reacts instantly to the scrolling of the frame counter. But for this to fully work I need “single frame scrolling” which I’m not able to do, sadly.

I have tried to adjust the scroll wheel sensitivity in Control Panel in Windows. The default value is “3 lines” per step on the wheel. I have tried the lowest scroll sensitivity, “1 line” per step. This resulted in that DP scrolled 4 frames in the counter instead of 12 which is better but still not there. The sensitivity doesn’t go low enough. Even at the lowest sensitivity DP still scrolls 4 frames.

I presume that in order to scroll a single frame you need to be able to scroll pixel by pixel in Windows, and I have no idea how to do that. I understand that Mac have the possibility to scroll pixel by pixel which would explain why it is possible to do single frame scrolling there. I suspect this issue comes from the porting of DP from Mac to Windows and that MOTU maybe forgot to compensate for the difference in scrolling between Windows and Mac. For me, scrolling works perfectly in all the other DAWs I have tried so far on the Windows platform.

Have any DP Windows users found a way around this problem?


2.
The second issue I’m having is also a scrolling issue. When I scroll in both the MIDI and Sequence editor, one step on the scroll wheel scrolls the entire screen two whole octaves up or down. For instance it goes all the way from C3 to C5 when I scroll only one step up. It’s really hard to navigate vertically in the sequencer this way and I have to use the slider on the left side all the time to find my notes. Things do get a little better when I lower sensitivity to “1 line” in Control Panel but it’s still not good enough. I have seen a couple of Youtube videos where Mac DP users scroll in the Sequence/MIDI editor and with them DP doesn’t scroll two octaves up or down, but more like a couple of semitones at max.

Is there anyone who knows a fix for this? I think this issue is also connected to the scroll wheel being “too sensitive” in DP.


3. (This last issue is not that critical but still something I’ve come across):
Quicktime movies (.mov) doesn’t work at all. DP doesn’t accept any .mov file: I’ve tried ProRes, DNxHD, Photo-JPEG, M-JPEG, and still nothing. The only .mov files that have worked so far are a few H.264 files, but they almost do not work at all. They slow DP down to absolute zero, really brings the program to it knees. So no good there.

AVI on the other hand works wonderfully (especially with M-JPEG encoding). MP4 also works fine even with H.264, although with H.264 CPU usage does go up to 55 % (in an empty project) if I use the wiper to seek in the movie, but that is normal behavior with H.264 for any DAW.

Is there any workaround for this Quicktime issue? The reason could be that Quicktime for Windows is maybe too “outdated” and only 32-bit (version 7.7.6). There is no Quicktime X for Windows, unfortunately.

But this is not too critical, issue 1 and 2 are though.


Sorry that this post got a little long.

I’m grateful for any feedback or help.