Issues with stuttering videos.

[Dill]

Hello guys,

 

some of the Videos in our project stutter a lot, but only sometimes. Most of the ones that have issues are encoded with QT animation codec and alpha channel. But some mpg2 does have this issues too.

 

This phenomena appears only sometimes. It doesn't matter if the system is started freshly or running for some hours with many changes. It isn't given that all or non of the clips behave like that. Sometimes one checks the part with one clip and it runs smooth, but if you run the show it stutters again. Sometimes only one of the clips, sometimes two or more, sometimes non and everything runs fine.

 

It happens also, that some clips in loop and freerun mode, stopped playing after a while, looped several times like expected and then showed a frozen picture.

 

Do you have any suggestions?

 

Thanks

Delil

[jfk]

Stuttering can come from many sources, from encoding minutiae to insufficient hardware.

 

Sounds  a bit like you may be incorrectly using B-frames in your encoding (B-frames should always be avoided),

known to cause stuttering issues like describe.

They are also known to cause lock-up issues like you describe

on long run / looping shows.

 

Any external cause of random movie stuttering can also cause random lockups.

 

Insufficient hardware is a possible cause.

Just because it runs smoothly sometimes does not mean the hardware is sufficient,

if you are pushing edge of performance, you may see stuttering at random places.

 

Also seen hardware sub-systems scaling down for power conservation cause random stuttering.

Sometimes shutting off power savings in Windows settings alone is not enough.

  (Specially a problem with laptops and systems based on mobile processors).

 

Background tasks that should have been disabled

 (like OS or other software automatically checking for updates)

have been known to cause random stuttering.

 

And those are just the most common issues, there are more. 

[Miro]

• Which version of WATCHOUT are you using?
• What's the resolution and framerate of the videos?
• Which GPU are you using?

A god tip is to kill explorer on the display servers since explorer has a lot of child processes that can interfere with WATCHOUT.

 

As JFK mentioned, disable any power saving plans and use the "High performance" one. If you are using a Nvidia GPU then set the following 3D settings in the Nvidia control panel:

• Power Management Mode: Prefer maximum performance

• Threaded Optimization: Off

If this doesn't help and if you are using an intel raid configuration then I would recommend you to install the latest Intel Rapid Storage driver/software.

[cowboyclint]

Also, you may try substituting green for alpha in your videos then using the key tween in WO to make them transparent again if possible. This has helped lots with the CPU for me.

[Thomas Leong]

Thermal throttling due to heat build-up could also be kicking in after a while, and thereby slow the cpu down.

[Walter]

Using greenkey in stead of alpha is a way, but for quality reasons I tend to render out an alpha mask version and using that as mask above the video. (No chance of green artifacts and also way better performance than using alpha in the videostream.