black screen when looping hap

[Kajetan Milowski]

Hi,

I have a huge problems on the show.

Hardware: Intel i7 5930K, 32GB RAM, nVidia quadro m4000, magewell pro capture quad hdmi, samsung 950 NVM 512GB for media, samsung 850 256GB for system, Windows 7 pro tweaked, vidvox hap component installed

1. Trying to play videos in the loop by putting all of them in one task and adding cue at the end "go to 0.0 and run". When it happens I get a black flash. I tried also putting all the files into one composition and then playback on the pause cue with free running and loop checked. Most videos are in HAP, one or two files (small timer) are in h264 and I also capture two laptops. I checked for black frames in the videos and there is none. How should I loop them to get a smooth transition?

2. This one is more serious. Watchout display is randomly crashing and restarts a watchpoint. Production computer shows a network error. Which is because the watchpoint crashed. Watchdog brings back watchpoint instantly. I created a startup script to minimize damage. But still this is very frustrating and client is not happy with that. I can't imagine what it will be if it would crash during presentation. What could be the reason? Does it really have to crash when any problem occurs? Can't you make watchout to find all the possible problems during producing a show or a test run?

Looking for answears

[RBeddig]

3 hours ago, Kajetan Milowski said:

Hardware: Intel i7 5930K, 32GB RAM, nVidia quadro m4000, magewell pro capture quad hdmi, samsung 950 NVM 512GB for media, samsung 850 256GB for system, Windows 7 pro tweaked, vidvox hap component installed

You do not need to install the vidvox HAP codec. WATCHOUT uses it's own codec and this is integrated in WATCHOUT. Installing the HAP codec might only make sense on a production computer in case that you want to use QT based software to transcode media. WATCHOUT does not need it.

3 hours ago, Kajetan Milowski said:

1. Trying to play videos in the loop by putting all of them in one task and adding cue at the end "go to 0.0 and run". When it happens I get a black flash. I tried also putting all the files into one composition and then playback on the pause cue with free running and loop checked. Most videos are in HAP, one or two files (small timer) are in h264 and I also capture two laptops. I checked for black frames in the videos and there is none. How should I loop them to get a smooth transition?

If I understand your description correctly, you are playing more than one video back-to-back in a timeline and then, after a couple of videos, you want to transition back to the beginning at 0:00.00? Using a control cue to jump back to the beginning will only work if you place one control cue appr. 1/2 frame inside the video at the beginning and a second control cue 1/2 frame before the end which points to the name of the first control cue. How much you have to stay away from the video edges depends a bit on the power of your system. Here ideally you have a looping video where the last frame is identical to the first frame. The reason is that once the timeline has reached the real end of your video the graphic card will kick it out. When you now jump back to 0.0 and your video starts here as well, WATCHOUT will have to load the video again without any chance to do this before showing the first frame. Usually WATCHOUT reads the video slightly before it gets rendered. Note that this way of looping only works when you play one clip only and you should normally avoid this approach.

The normal way of playing loops would be to set the video in free-running and looping mode and stop at a pause cue. If you do this with one clip it should not show black. In this case WATCHOUT will load a second instance of the file to do the looping transition. This also means that your hardware needs to be able to play two instances of the file at the same time!

If you have more than one video in a row and want to play the complete part in a loop, you'd need to first build your show in a timeline and then copy it to a composition. Make sure that the length of the composition is exactly as long as the videos! All videos inside your composition should not be set to free-running and looping. Instead you'd put the composition in free-running and looping mode.

4 hours ago, Kajetan Milowski said:

2. This one is more serious. Watchout display is randomly crashing and restarts a watchpoint. Production computer shows a network error. Which is because the watchpoint crashed. Watchdog brings back watchpoint instantly. I created a startup script to minimize damage. But still this is very frustrating and client is not happy with that. I can't imagine what it will be if it would crash during presentation. What could be the reason? Does it really have to crash when any problem occurs? Can't you make watchout to find all the possible problems during producing a show or a test run?

There are thousands of reasons why a computer or software might crash and no software can find all the reasons why it might crash. This is one of the main reasons why Dataton started to build WATCHMAX and WATCHPAX servers since here the dev team can do long time test runs and tweak Windows and all drivers to make the system stable and fast. Changing the version of a single driver can dramatically change the behavior of a software. 

But there is some help.

WATCHOUT writes a couple of log files, both on the production computer and on the display computer. They are placed inside the folder logs in the WATCHOUT folder. Read those files and possibly this might get you a hint. Windows also writes log files of the Windows system. >> Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Event Viewer/Windows Logs

It is also a good idea to double check the tweaking of your system. I've seen crashes where the owner of the system swore that it was fully tweaked and in the end it was a tiny settings which he overlooked which caused the crashes.

BTW, when posting here it always helps to mention the version of WATCHOUT 😉

 

 

 

 

 

 

[mindopera]

Are you seeing any error messages when Watchout crashes?  If yes, what do they read?

[jfk]

On 9/2/2019 at 10:42 AM, mindopera said:

Are you seeing any error messages when Watchout crashes?  If yes, what do they read?

In addition to production error window messages, look in the Watchout folder for a logs folder in the computer that actually crashes. In there will be plain text files with event records that may more accurately identify the issue.

[Add]

i have the same question

did you solved?

my display computer is watchpax60 3368b...

and still have same question

why?

[wiesemann]

Hello,

In my experience, REAL error-free looping between cues in an AUX timeline is not possible (be it stills or video, whatever codec or format). there will always be a short flash to „transparent“, revealing the layer beneath it. Often showing black.

So, either use looping with „free-run“ or make the aux timeline so long and repeat the clip as long as needed. Like several hoursor so...

Otherwise use the main-timeline for looping a clip/stills between cues.

So sad. But still loving the system...

[ectoplasmosis]

Reliable looping between cues on aux timelines is possible using the methods above, providing your server hardware is powerful enough. 
 

SSD IOPs and read speed, GPU horsepower and PCIe bandwidth must be sufficient and balanced to enable seamless and accurate jumping between cues whilst playing high-bitrate non-keyframed content. 
 

Our 6-output servers can happily loop 6x 4K60fps HAPQ video layers in aux timelines simultaneously with no blank frames. 

[jfk]

Thanks all for the feedback on performance. When providing such useful information it would be helpful if you included the WATCHOUT version providing the observed performance.

[Anonimysa]

I never managed to correctly loop, do you have any ideas how this is done at all, did anyone succeed? (It's about moments over 1 minute)

[RBeddig]

The most important point is that the cue to loop back has to sit somewhere BEFORE the end of the video, e.g. 0.015 sec earlier. The point to jump too also needs to be AFTER the start of the video. Once the video reaches the end of the cue rectangle the graphic card will forget about it and needs to reload again. As long as you stay within the borders of the cue it will keep the file in the memory.