Michael Scheck

Thanks Rainer, for looking into the files. Interesting tool you use to read out the specs of the movie.... I wonder if anybody else has encoded a h264 with 50fps (or even 60fps for the americas) and a higher resolution than 1920x1080, and that successfully ran in Watchout. It would be interesting to know the encoding details. Michael

Early 2009? Oh my goodness, time passes by so quickly! OK, I´ll get some new processors some time in the future.... But the display-machine in question has a very tightly tweaked system on it and definitly is a very clean install, and there is absolutly nothing else than windows and Watchout on it. No codec pack, thats certain. The machine with the Medialooks Watermark was my office-PC, which I sometimes use to programm at the beginning of a project. Or is that also a no-go and does the production-PC need to be sterile at all times also? Michael

The files were made with Adobe Encoder CS6 on a PC. The display machine is a GA-X58-UD5 board, i7 920, 6GB RAM, Radeon HD6970, Win7HP32, 10K HDD© + SSD(D). You are right, the files do not play in QT. Sorry for that, it was just that I encoded about 30 different varieties of h264 and did not test all of them in QT as well. I just put some other files up on the server: www.cds.de/testWO2.zip The h264-files in that folder are made with Adobe After Effects CS6, they play in Quicktime but have the same problem in Watchout: the 1400x1050/25fps and 2330x1050/25fps play ok, but the 2330x1050/50fps does not. I have a workaround now, I am using pre-split movies (1400x1050/50fps) in h264 (I know this is not recomended, but I just need the sharpness that goes with the h264, mpg2 is too soft, at least the results that I get out of adobe encoder and telestream episode). But still it is good to know if I am tripping the possibilities of the hardware or if it is a configuration-dependent. Thank you very much for testing and commenting! Michael

Hi guys, I just ran got stuck on a problem where I could use some advice: I have some animations that I want to put into Watchout as h264 movies, because with this codec they look best and a bit sharper than with mpg. The animations are made with 50 fps. If I put the 50fps-h264 movie in the timeline it runs ok in the preview on the production-PC but on the display-PC it freezes on the first frame. When I stop the timeline within the movie, the display-PC "catches up" on the frame where I stopped. If I switch to a 25fps movie all is fine. I tried several newly setup display machines that where built very much according to the recommendations and also one older machine, all show the same problem. I put the testmovies on our server, maybe somebody wants to check them on other machines: www.cds.de/testWO.zip (30megs) There are three files. First one is 1920x1080@25fps (always runs ok), second one ist 1920x1080@50fps (gets stuck sometimes), third one is 2330x1050@50fps (never works). Is it just asking too much of the machines with these files or should this work? Any suggestions to get it runnng? Thanks! Michael

Hi all, I had the same Medialooks-thing on my production-machine . I then uninstalled the the two or three most recent installed software-packages and it disappeared. Among those was a demo version of Stumpfl Wings, this one most likely had the Medialooks Codec in it. Was Wings on the other machines that had this phenomena? Sorry, I should have uninstalled one package at a time, but as usual I was very unpatient and threw out several packages in one go..... Michael

Hi Frederik, I´ll do that tomorrow after it´s set up at the venue. But I do not have much hope that it changes anything, since I already did a restore from the master-image of our display-pc´s without anything changing.... Regards, Michael

Hi everyone, when testing an upcoming show in the studio today I have encountered a very strange thing that I could not resolve. Maybe somebody has had something similar and can point me to the problem: On one of three identical Display-PCs movies with H264 Codec do not play. They appear on screen with the first frame or maybe play for a second or so and then freeze. All other content on top of the H264-video plays OK. MPEG-Video plays OK, too. It´s just the H264. Judging from the HDD-LED the movie is played, the LED shows traffic when playing only the h264 part of the show. I´m using Win7/32 with the new 5.2 version. This is what I did so far without seeing any changes: - check an old show that worked fine previously with 5.1. It has the same problems - reinstalled a working image - uninstalled WO and did a fresh install - uninstalled Quicktime and did a fresh install, also stepped back one version from 7.7 to 7.69 - unistall and reinstall the grafics driver, also tried 3 versions of catalyst: 11.9, 12.1 and 12.3 The only thing I didn´t do is reinstall WO5.1 and try and old show. This is probably no option because I made the show that I need in 5.2, so I guess I´m stuck to the new version anyway. It somehow points to a hardware defect. Is this possible? To check that I would need to swap components between a working PC and the bad one, no time for that now... Or is there any other likely explanation? All suggestions are very welcome! Regards, Michael

In Watchout 5.1 I have "Enabled Conditional Layer" selected. The Layer ist set to condition 1. In Preferences this condtion is not checked, so it is off. Sound is still playing on the production PC, changing to "All conditional layers" or "no conditional layers" does not change anything. The icon on my stage is turning on and off according to my condition setting, so I would expect this to be ok on the display-computer, but I do not have any display-computers around to check that. But that is not the problem: I just want to shut off the timecode-chirping while I am programming the show and still listen to the other soundfiles I have. From reading the manual on conditional layers with the example of using it for different languages I would expect it to also turn off sound, not just images and videos, on the production pc. Does anybody else have the same behaveour?

I have a Timecode-Wavefile on a conditional layer that is disabled. Still I hear the sound on my production PC. Is this a feature or a bug? Michael.

Just wondering: When using one display computer with f.e. 3 outputs for a widescreen-softedge-show and place a movie over all three displays, does the movie get played three times or only once? Is Watchout acting like three independant instances of the program or is there any ressource-saving thing happening here in a MO-configuration? Is pre-splitting movies still recommended in this szenario? Kind regards, Michael.