DavidPatrick

I've confirmed this also happens with still image files, so it's not only videos. That makes me think it's not framerate related. And they are pretty small images at that. I'm going to send a test file over to dataton support and see what they say.

I have several video files in a show which have match frames - i.e. the ending frame of video one is the same as the starting frame of video two. When I butt the two videos together (either on the same layer or on different layers) I get drop outs. Meaning Watchout shows a quick flash to whatever is below when it rolls past the break in the clips. To solve this, I have to overlap them between .1 and .2 seconds. Sometimes this is an acceptable workaround, but sometimes it doesn't due to the animations. Is this expected behavior? Is there anything I can do to eliminate these flashes consistently without overlapping? Is there anything which would impact this which I can avoid or change (framerate, codec, etc)? All content is currently at 24fps, running the system at 30Hz. All files are chunked HAP. Fast HDDs and solid video cards. I can't say for sure, but I recollect I have done this before in previous version of Watchout and not had these issues. Currently using 6.2.2.

@matkeane Thanks. I'll give it a look - that might be a good option. @Benoit I'm currently running WO 6.2.2, but can't see a way to load a video into DIS. Inside the program you are limited to JPG, TIFF, PNG, SWF, or HTML. And inside WO, you can choose image, flash, HTML, or Desktop. I'd love if DIS supported video files - doesn't seem like a stretch to incorporate them.

I confirmed via testing today that the Scan Converter app is not compatible with Watchout Display. Once Watchpoint goes full screen, I only get a black output.

A further update: The NDI plugin for VLC only works with VLC 2.x. (An update to NDI is supposedly coming...) However, alpha channels are only supported in VLC 3.x. I have some other options for an NDI source, such as Millumin and ProPresenter, but have not dug into those. I think the death nail on this may be sync. Even if I can have a simultaneous fire of both Watchout and my second video source, I don't believe the NDI feed will ever sync with the video pieces local to the display machine. I also attempted to use the NDI Scan Converter app on a display machine to have Watchout act as the NDI output, but apparently when Watchout goes full screen it prevents NDI from sending the content. I was only able to see black.

@Benoit That's fair. In this case it's for speaker titles during a show. The client wants nice, animated titles, but may not know the order or even the name of all the presenters before the show starts. Since Watchout will be live to screen, I won't be able to ingest new media later in my timeline without interrupting what's already live to screen. This means someone from the content team would render titles during the show, then we would live composite those with existing backgrounds. We can do this with a downstream key in a high res switcher (E2, Spyder, etc), but I was researching options to keep it all inside of Watchout, reducing the complexities to a single operator. NDI seems perfect if I can fit all the pieces together.

Sorry about that. Yes, video. Ideally HAP Alpha, though any QuickTime flavor is probably fine. Animation with alpha, etc.

I'm considering using the NDI VLC plugin to play clips. The biggest thing is I need to be able to trigger my main timeline and my alpha clip at the same time, so my third party playback software needs to accept TCP commands I can place in my WO timeline. @Mike Fahl Thanks. I read the article, but as I understand it Dynamic Image Server won't play back video files, only stills, flash and HTML5. In my case they'd need to be actual videos I think. I wish DIS would support video, especially since it's based on NDI now.

I've notice when adding an NDI media element there's an option to choose one with an Alpha channel. Can someone give me more information about this? How do you output the NDI stream so it supports the alpha channel? In my quick looking in the NDI Scan Converter tool there doesn't seem to be any options for this. Is there specific hardware / software which supports this?

We have also had good success with Magewell products. They sell dual and quad input HDMI cards. http://www.magewell.com/pro-capture-family

Has anyone tried using the NDI Scan Converter software running on a display machine to act as the NDI output, then feed that back into Watchout to be used elsewhere? In my case I need to add media to a timeline during show, so I need a separate system to do this. But that content needs to be live composited on top of existing content in my main timeline. And it all needs to be triggered simultaneously. Seems like using NDI out on one display machine and NDI in on the main system would work nicely, then IP commands to make everything fire simultaneously.

Thanks Mike. Sorry for my lack of detail. Good info to know. We have had lots of other issues on this show, so I can't entirely isolate the cause. However, after some reworking of the sync signal and EDIDs on the graphics card, this seems to be resolved. I'm going to chalk this one up to weird refresh rates in the chain.

This is a multi-part question: I occasionally get tearing on stills in Watchout. It doesn't seem to be consistent, and I can't quite nail down why. It's almost always big stills...8k, 9k wide. I've tried different file formats and nothing seems to be the silver bullet. So the first part of the question is, what part of the computer does the heavy lifting of fading a still? Is that the GPU or CPU? And would additional system RAM or video ram help that? The second and related question is using sync cards between machines. We have traditionally used AMD cards with the s400 sync modules and had good success. However, we have been moving to nVidia Quadro cards (M4000 and P4000) as they benchmark at better performance and have much more flexibility in the software. We have the appropriate Sync I and Sync II modules. In my current scenario with two display machines using these nVidia cards and sync modules, I have set them in various configurations: to be external sync on both cards, external sync on one card feeding sync the second, and internal sync on one feeding the second. In all cases, I still intermittently get tearing between machines. It doesn't seem to happen on the videos, but does on stills. Curious what's happening on the back end which could cause this. And finally, can someone elaborate on what the "sync chain master" checkbox does under the hood? Does Watchout actually talk to both the s400 and Sync I / II modules? If you are using external sync to each module, does this checkbox still matter, as there's not really a "master"? I have also found when I make an adjustment on one display machine (say re-launch Watchout), sync struggles until I re-launch on the second machine. Is this expected behavior? Just trying to understand the technology better so I can fix things quicker in the middle of the night on a show! Thanks!

We have both the FCA610 and 1616 boxes, and they work very well for us. 6.2 will add ASIO support, which opens up a lot of options.

I've also found it can be due to the placement of your cues. This may not be the actual "cause", but separating the pause cue back from the media cue (back the pause cue up .5s for instance) seems to help. This extra time may give Watchout a chance to push / receive the command over the network despite the traffic, and results in the display machines not moving on to the next piece of media. Give it a try. That's usually our workaround when we don't have time to suss a network issue.

We have started upgrading our machines to M.2 drives and noticed a 3x jump in HD read speeds over our SSD RAID-0. To Thomas' point, when I first installed the M.2 drive directly to the motherboard, I didn't get much speed bump. However, by attaching the drive to a PCIe adapter card, I was able to take advantage of the full PCIe 3.0 x4 speed. The adapter cards sell for about $20 USD, so it's not a big investment if you're buying an M.2 already. Just another option if you don't have a fast M.2 port on your motherboard. Some motherboards are also configurable (based on where other cards are installed, BIOS settings, etc) so give your MB manual a good read also.

I've been playing around with image sequence playback in WO 6 (Just upgraded to 6.1.6), and can't seem to get smooth playback. My test file is 8228 x 1200, which is admittedly pretty large. But if I make a HAP 6-chunk encode, it plays beautifully. However, I've tried a TIFF uncompressed, PNG uncompressed, and JPG sequences, and all of them drop frames significantly. Specs: Intel i7 3.6GHz 16 GB RAM 1TB m.2 NVMe SSD connected via PCIe 3.0. (Read speeds are consistently over 2.0 GB/s) nVidia P4000 card I'm sending it out across three outputs from one machine. Am I pushing beyond the limits of what Watchout can currently do? Or am I experiencing a bottleneck from somewhere? Has anyone else consistently gotten smooth playback of an image sequence in the 8k+ range? In theory since each image file, even in the TIFF version, is under 30mb, I should be under 900 mb / s @ 30fps. Which is less than half the read speeds I'm getting when I test the drive. Is my math wrong on that? Obviously HAP is the solution for now, but we're very interested in the possibilities image sequence playback offers. Thanks! dp

Have you tried adjusting the Transparency method on the media element in the Media Bin? We've found "Auto" doesn't always pick the best option.

I'm working on mapping a pretty significant model using three 3D mapping projectors hitting the same 3D object from different directions. The alignment / calibration has been fine, but as these things go, i can't get it all the way there using just that tool. So I'm tweaking with full geometry correction. At first it was fine, but as I add more points, I get more and more crashes, usually when adding a new point. The display software is fine (running on big machines - 12 core processors, AMD W9100 cards) - it's the production software that goes down. I am using a somewhat wimpy production machine - would an upgrade there help? Or is there a known / theoretical limit to how many correction points you can apply to a 3D mapping projector? Thanks!

v 5.5.1 No MIDI (Error only said "Buffer Overflow" - no mention of anything else. No inputs or outputs. No external control. Only two outs from a single machine. Got a couple Aux timelines, but they aren't doing much. Almost all the show is in the Main Timeline. A couple comps, but I can't isolate it to that. Message would pop up while I'm sitting paused in the timeline...I don't recall it happening while I was playing anything. Also popped up once after I refreshed changed media. Like I said, hasn't affected anything. Just curious what it means so I can avoid...that box popping up always makes me a touch nervous.

Error: Buffer Overflow Anyone know what this error means? Doesn't seem to affect anything...show still performs fine. Can't seem to replicate it consistently either. dp

Hi Rob- This may be more of a "hack" but I think it would work... Put in your looping clip first. Then butt your next clip up to it (on a different layer) so it will play immediately following with no black space. Place a jump control cue at the exact end of the looping clip, jumping back to a cue at the exact start of the looping clip. So when you are at the start of your show, the timeline is moving along, playing your looping clip, but the loop is created but the control cues jumping back to the top of the clip. When you're ready to start, while in the middle of playing your looping clip, just delete the jump cue (highlight and push "delete" on the keyboard) before the playhead gets to it. Watchout should just keep playing past where it was, directly into your next clip seamlessly. Might have to play with the jump cue points by a few .000s of a second to line it all up, and possibly manually pre-roll the second clip, but as far as control it should work. dp

Hi Merten: It depends on what you mean by "instantly." I believe Canon (and probably Nikon and others) have a program or SDK that allows you to pull images off the card in camera to a computer. You'd then use the DIS to pull that image through to Watchout. The DIS part would happen pretty quickly, depending on the resolution of the image. However, I don't know the lag time to pull the image from the camera. We successfully did this on a big trade show late last year, though I wasn't involved in pulling the images from the camera - only the WO side. Otherwise, you could send the HDMI output to an input card of a display machine, which would be about as instant as you can get, potentially with only a few frames of lag. However, I believe generally the camera will only show the taken image for a few seconds before defaulting back to a live view, so that might not be acceptable. There may be camera settings however to adjust this. Hope that helps. Seems mostly dependent on your camera choice. dp

I have a content creator that can only build video in Flash. As they are large files, the export process to a standard video codec is painful and so far has not been reliable. I'm attempting to use the DIS to serve the SWF files as a workaround. I can get the SWF to load in the DIS and appear correctly on the display machine, but it doesn't play. I've tried passing play=true in the parameters to the SWF file, but no change. Any trick there? When I open the same SWF via a web browser or flash player, it plays fine. Does DIS pause SWFs by default? Thanks!

Sorry to let this drop...got into a show and it was busy. The SWF is working great via the DIS now. I believe it was something with the machine operating the DIS. We moved to a different machine and that part has since been working flawlessly. There also may have been an issue with some fields in the SWF file (accessing a json file) which caused it to fail. As I suspected, it was ultimately a Flash dev issue, not DIS. Thanks! dp