Howdy folks. First off, a show of hands please. Who runs a rig similar to mine:
- Athlon XP (mine's an 1800+)
- Windows XP Pro
- VIA KT266A DDR mobo with all drivers applied
- VV3
- OHCI firewire card
Alright! Now, here's the problem I'm having and I'd love to know if anyone else experiences the same phenomenon.
When capturing from DV (either from my camcorder or my Sony DVMC-DA2 box), response is instantaneous and ne'er a frame is dropped. So far so good.
When playing back a finished project from the VV3 timeline, no hiccups at all. So far so good.
Incidentally, I use Scenalyzer Live to play rendered .avi's to the camcorder (it's got some advanced buffering techniques to further prevent dropouts and I used it exclusively with VV2, so old habits die hard). When doing so, I notice that there's a few seconds lag between what's on camera and what's in the preview window. Never noticed this in my older, slower BX-based PIII system. However it continues to play just fine out to tape, so no big deal.
Now here's the real annoyance: when _previewing_ in VV3 out to firewire, I notice the following:
1) When I press Space to start/stop playback, the firewire preview jumps a few frames every so often. It's stuttery. If I quickly zoom in and out while this happens it's worse, or if I zoom up close enough that the timeline is constantly redrawing it's also worse. Stopping the playback and restarting it can clear up the stutter, for a bit. No grey blocks or blue screens...just herky-jerky playback.
2) When clicking from the trimmer back to the timeline and vise-versa, VV3 seems to 'lose' the firewire and it takes a few seconds to reinitialize the preview. Never noticed this before but I made the switch from a PIII/Win2k/VV2 system to the Athlon/XP/VV3 simultaneously. So I'm not sure where the problem is!
That's really it. If I just work within the on-screen video window there's never a lost frame or stuttery moment. Only previewing through firewire stutters.
Final playback, again, is also perfect. So does anyone else with a similar system experience this?
I thought it was perhaps a bandwidth-sucking AGP card taking cycles away from the firewire card (nVidia cards are notorious for high PCI latency settings and aggressive bus usage) so I put in a Radeon 8500 instead. No difference. Tried multiple slots and IRQs, a different firewire card (still TI-based), and still no difference. What DID seem to make a difference was forcing the old native TI drivers to be installed in place of Microsoft's OHCI camcorder drivers. There was no stuttering at all while previewing - for the few seconds at a time it would work before VV crashed and burned with big error messages. :)
Is this an XP-ism that I have to live with until DirectX 8.2 comes out, a VV3/XP incompatibility, or perhaps some VIA chipset problem? No big deal, really, since it's only on preview that it happens - but I figured that by quadrupling my CPU speed the last thing I'd see would be frame stutters... :)
BTW, audio never stutters - only video. Perhaps XP doesn't like VV3's method of sending video out firewire while sending audio out the sound card when previewing...
Thanks guys,
-Doug
- Athlon XP (mine's an 1800+)
- Windows XP Pro
- VIA KT266A DDR mobo with all drivers applied
- VV3
- OHCI firewire card
Alright! Now, here's the problem I'm having and I'd love to know if anyone else experiences the same phenomenon.
When capturing from DV (either from my camcorder or my Sony DVMC-DA2 box), response is instantaneous and ne'er a frame is dropped. So far so good.
When playing back a finished project from the VV3 timeline, no hiccups at all. So far so good.
Incidentally, I use Scenalyzer Live to play rendered .avi's to the camcorder (it's got some advanced buffering techniques to further prevent dropouts and I used it exclusively with VV2, so old habits die hard). When doing so, I notice that there's a few seconds lag between what's on camera and what's in the preview window. Never noticed this in my older, slower BX-based PIII system. However it continues to play just fine out to tape, so no big deal.
Now here's the real annoyance: when _previewing_ in VV3 out to firewire, I notice the following:
1) When I press Space to start/stop playback, the firewire preview jumps a few frames every so often. It's stuttery. If I quickly zoom in and out while this happens it's worse, or if I zoom up close enough that the timeline is constantly redrawing it's also worse. Stopping the playback and restarting it can clear up the stutter, for a bit. No grey blocks or blue screens...just herky-jerky playback.
2) When clicking from the trimmer back to the timeline and vise-versa, VV3 seems to 'lose' the firewire and it takes a few seconds to reinitialize the preview. Never noticed this before but I made the switch from a PIII/Win2k/VV2 system to the Athlon/XP/VV3 simultaneously. So I'm not sure where the problem is!
That's really it. If I just work within the on-screen video window there's never a lost frame or stuttery moment. Only previewing through firewire stutters.
Final playback, again, is also perfect. So does anyone else with a similar system experience this?
I thought it was perhaps a bandwidth-sucking AGP card taking cycles away from the firewire card (nVidia cards are notorious for high PCI latency settings and aggressive bus usage) so I put in a Radeon 8500 instead. No difference. Tried multiple slots and IRQs, a different firewire card (still TI-based), and still no difference. What DID seem to make a difference was forcing the old native TI drivers to be installed in place of Microsoft's OHCI camcorder drivers. There was no stuttering at all while previewing - for the few seconds at a time it would work before VV crashed and burned with big error messages. :)
Is this an XP-ism that I have to live with until DirectX 8.2 comes out, a VV3/XP incompatibility, or perhaps some VIA chipset problem? No big deal, really, since it's only on preview that it happens - but I figured that by quadrupling my CPU speed the last thing I'd see would be frame stutters... :)
BTW, audio never stutters - only video. Perhaps XP doesn't like VV3's method of sending video out firewire while sending audio out the sound card when previewing...
Thanks guys,
-Doug