Last frame pauses while previewing

Quiet One wrote on 2/22/2012, 8:10 PM

Sometimes while previewing multiple clips, the last frame of the clip seems to pause in preview before displaying the next clip. It's only for an instant, but is noticeable to me.

It seems to happen more often when there are Video FX on the clip, but also with no Video FX.

Has anyone else seen this? And if so, is there a fix?

I'm running VP11 64-bit on a Windows 7 64-bit machine.

Comments

farss wrote on 2/22/2012, 10:30 PM

"Has anyone else seen this?"

Yes, worse when the cut is between different media e.g. XDCAM EX and HDV.

"And if so, is there a fix?"

Reduce amount of preview RAM, number of thumbnails and have all the media on a local fast (7200 rPM) disk can help.

Bob.

Quiet One wrote on 3/17/2012, 3:48 PM

Thanks Bob.

It seems to me that this shouldn't be happening. I've put AVCHD clips onto the timeline. All the same media from an AF100. No effects added. I have a pretty substantial Dell XPS, Core i7, 64-bit PC, 12GB RAM, WIndows 7.

I've reduced the preview RAM to 200MB, thumbnails first, middle, end, and the media is on a 7200RPM drive.

All I want to do is preview an assembly cut of the clips, but the preview seems to pause at the end of each clip.

Any other ideas? Is there a setting that might need to be changed? Some kind of transitions setting?

Or would I be advised to transcode to Cineform or something like that?

Thank you.

larry-peter wrote on 3/19/2012, 12:21 PM

I have seen the same with clips from my AF100, although it happens much more rarely with the last 2 updates to V11 and using preview acceleration. Your system seems comparable to mine, and I have tested with the clips on a RAID 0 and an internal 7200rpm drive with no difference. It worsens with the number of clips I have on the timeline also.
I have come to believe this is a computational (rather than disk throughput) bottleneck myself. AVCHD takes a lot of CPU power to process and the AF100 clips seem to take a bit more computational power than some I've used from other cameras. I saw a quote on another forum that I enjoyed, talking about the AVCHD implementation used in cameras to get a quality, high-compression ratio in real-time: "AVCHD is a package that's easy to put things into, but difficult to rearrange the items once inside." It's a difficult file to edit natively and if it's a big project I almost always end up using proxies during base edit (MXF generally).

Larry

Edit: And I'll bet RAM loading and unloading plays some part, depending on what other services are running. I've always assumed that the ability to "edit native" means that the clip start and end GOPs have to be held in memory, to allow for edits inside the GOPs. Since these GOPs can be several seconds long, a lot of clips could mean a lot of memory activity when you get dozens of clips on the timeline. Not sure of this, but my feeble logic leads me to believe it.