[Two Watchpax 4 Questions]

4 hours ago, wiesemann said:

why don‘t you just leave them on?

I've been told to restart my companies larger Watchout servers regularly to ensure there's no weirdness with memory.  I usually don't.

 

1 hour ago, Diego Marchente said:

Hi,

Do you also have Brightsign installed on the same network ???

Diego

I do not have Brightsign.

[Two Watchpax 4 Questions]

Hello all,

Two questions about the Watchpax 4. I have a trade show coming up where I'll have two watchpax running for a few days straight. It will just be looping three files the whole time.

First, how do you turn on/off/ restart the Watchpax safely? I don't see a power button.

Second, should I restart the Watchpax every morning? I always hear recommendations to do that on full servers, but I'm curious if I need to with these.

Thanks!

[Looping Videos Across Multiple Display Servers]

Yea I do need a tight loop in this case, but I'm also looking for techniques for any type of loop.

My assumption of free-running and looping was that it begins to preload the first few frames ahead of time while it was nearing the end of the video.  Are you saying the first few frames remain in video memory the entire time the cue is active?    I'd assume that if the CPU was not always decoding previous frames jumping backwards in time would always be a lot smoother than it usually is.

I really wish that jump cues had a toggle to preload the video it's jumping to.  Though, a method of syncing free running and looping videos should be the priority, in my opinion.

It seems odd that we are using workarounds for such a basic feature.

Thanks again!

[Looping Videos Across Multiple Display Servers]

4 hours ago, RBeddig said:

If you jump out at the middle of a frame and back into the middle of a frame two halves of the runtime of the frame is lost. Therefore doubling the frame can help to prevent a visible effect in this case. If everything is rather slow you'll probably can do without this.

Oh ok. Interesting. I'll give that a shot.

 

5 hours ago, SFluster said:

I like to place a still a layer below the videos with a duration longer than the video I want to loop. In my experience it keeps that black frame from appearing with the jump. see attached example:

This is my go to approach if there's a static image on the front and back of the video clip as well. 

[Looping Videos Across Multiple Display Servers]

Ok, makes sense with the free run and loop.

I've been able to get the jump cue to work with low resolution files like 1920x1080, but not so much with multiple 4k HAP files. 

Why would you put the same frame twice in this case?  If the frame is not being decoded in time I'm unsure of how an identical frame would help improve the loop.

Thanks!

[Looping Videos Across Multiple Display Servers]

Hello all,

I'll often use Watchout on tradeshows where we need to simply loop videos in sync across multiple display servers for hours.  Most of the loop techniques I've tried end up with poor results over time.

Things I've tried-

Simply settings videos to free running and looping - movies drift out of sync very quickly

Putting content into a composition and setting the comp to free run and loop - out of sync over time.

Creating a loop using a jump cue to hop back to the beginning of the video file - movie doesn't get preloaded so we get a frame of black

Two timelines with the same video that trigger each other to loop - inconsistent.  Sometimes it will loop fine, sometimes a frame of black will pop up.

Putting content into a comp, duplicating the comp over and over so it spans hours and playing it straight through -  inconsistent due to composition preload bug.

Copying whole timeline over and over and playing it straight through for hours-  only consistent approach I've found.

 

What do you usually do to simply loop a video without it going out of sync?

I have a show coming up where I'll use two Watchpax 4s to loop some video files for an LED wall. They must remain in sync all day.

Thanks!