Poor video performance with DP 8.07

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This forum is for seeking solutions to technical problems involving Digital Performer and/or plug-ins on Windows, as well as feature requests, criticisms, comparison to other DAWs.
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kdm
Posts: 162
Joined: Sat Mar 03, 2007 7:16 pm
Primary DAW OS: Windows

Poor video performance with DP 8.07

Post by kdm »

I've tried PJpeg, mp4, and avi, and no luck getting anything close to reasonable video performance with DP on Win7x64.

Any ideas or advice on what might cause DP to perform so poorly with video playback?

The very same videos run perfectly in Nuendo, Cubase and Studio One on the same system, so it isn't a system issue with Quicktime.

Performance isn't good with DP (the same project configuration hits 40-50% on DP's meter, but only 20-25% on Nuendo's - same plugins, track config, buffer settings, etc). Video is far worse - adding another 50% load to DP's playback engine, hence clicks, pops and audio breakups. All video resides on a separate drive from everything else, and in this test case, the only audio playback is from VI's on a slave system via lightpipe hardware returns, so just audio inputs into DP (and Nuendo for my comparison test).

I have scoured the forum but not found anything that would explain this, though I have seen several other reports of poor performance for video on Win/DP8.

Thanks!
jsg
Posts: 44
Joined: Fri May 03, 2013 7:43 pm
Primary DAW OS: Windows

Re: Poor video performance with DP 8.07

Post by jsg »

kdm wrote:I've tried PJpeg, mp4, and avi, and no luck getting anything close to reasonable video performance with DP on Win7x64.

Any ideas or advice on what might cause DP to perform so poorly with video playback?

The very same videos run perfectly in Nuendo, Cubase and Studio One on the same system, so it isn't a system issue with Quicktime.

Performance isn't good with DP (the same project configuration hits 40-50% on DP's meter, but only 20-25% on Nuendo's - same plugins, track config, buffer settings, etc). Video is far worse - adding another 50% load to DP's playback engine, hence clicks, pops and audio breakups. All video resides on a separate drive from everything else, and in this test case, the only audio playback is from VI's on a slave system via lightpipe hardware returns, so just audio inputs into DP (and Nuendo for my comparison test).

I have scoured the forum but not found anything that would explain this, though I have seen several other reports of poor performance for video on Win/DP8.

Thanks!
Not having that issue, I loaded a Windows Media file and the video and audio are totally smooth.

Jerry
kdm
Posts: 162
Joined: Sat Mar 03, 2007 7:16 pm
Primary DAW OS: Windows

Re: Poor video performance with DP 8.07

Post by kdm »

What video and audio cards do you have, if I may ask?

Have you tried any other video formats? I never get a wmf file, so I've only tried mp4, h264/mov, MJpeg, PJpeg and AVI. Ironically, DP plays video perfectly on our cheap home PC with built in graphics, running on the stock Windows driver. Almost no cpu load at all, and it's only a 4G i5. But with RME and an NVidia GT640 on my studio system, and a slave i7 PC (Nvidia, MOTU 2408PCIe), no go.
aerolis
Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 4:07 am
Primary DAW OS: Windows

Re: Poor video performance with DP 8.07

Post by aerolis »

AVI with M-JPEG and JPEG encoding runs really smooth on my system. I run DP 8.07 on Win7 x64. Around 17 % CPU load in any project. You could give M-JPEG encoding a try.

I use MPEG Streamclip to convert videos to this format.

MP4 also works OK 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.

Quicktime movies (.mov) doesn’t work at all on my system.
Last edited by aerolis on Tue Jul 07, 2015 5:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
kdm
Posts: 162
Joined: Sat Mar 03, 2007 7:16 pm
Primary DAW OS: Windows

Re: Poor video performance with DP 8.07

Post by kdm »

I converted another short video to AVI/PJpeg in Mpeg Streamclip (down-res'd to 480x288), and it played fine, but looked terrible. DP seems to have issues with pro audio card drivers and some video cards (video plays better with Windows drivers, but latency is far too much for scoring work).

I also found that performance degrades significantly with each input buss (aux or audio track in monitor mode) for my slave audio returns, but I'll post that in a different thread, hoping there is a separate solution.
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