Resolume crashed way to many times this weekend....

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Yuckfou157
Hasn't felt like this about software in a long time
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Resolume crashed way to many times this weekend....

Post by Yuckfou157 »

So my fellow VJ's, what should have been a very nice VJ'ing weekend turned out a little disastrous, to say the least...
I'll split this topic in three parts, first, what happened, then how my resolume is set up and in the end I'll tell you what I am using...

First, I had a 2 day gig in Arnhem, a 10.000 people packed hardstyle event where I did the mainstage together with my VJ buddy, he is using VDMX with no trouble, I stick to Arena with lots of trouble....
So the first issue came when mapping the 8 separate screens in arena, no biggie of course, I had the drawing from Pixelscreen and when your are used that 0,0 in the drawing actually means 0,0 plus the half of the screen resolution horizontal and vertical things couldn't be easier..wrong! Probably the fault from the LED supplier, but everything was 5 or 10 points/pixel different from the drawing, no problem of course, opening advanced output and mapping everything in place and shazam, it worked,until I clicked save&close, that made resolume stop, not once but like 16 times over and over again it stopped working and needed to be re-started...
Image
Now I'm not the world's best VJ, but this is not something heavy in my opinion, this is easy peasy mapping with some slices and should not give any problems..but it did, over and over again, finally it worked and we could start doing what we came to do, rock the screens 8-)
Until resolume quited again, and with restarting it again using the advanced output caused it to crash and crash, with no clips selected, nothing playing and some sweet talking to my laptop it got running again and we finished of the first night.
So day2, Kingsday and again a sell out, same location, same LED, but different mapping, just two slices to cover everything instead of a lot of smaller onces and this seemed more stable, resolume did stop a few times, maybe once or twice or no more... which again shouldn't have happen, but okay, it worked....
Using the bigger slices showed something different and something that worried me very much.
Because of the music, hardstyle, everything was flashy and fast and I used a lot of FX, stripper, jitter, mirror, colorizing etc. and what I saw was that the quality of the image went down spectacular, not just a little, but a lot, shading, shadows, lines turning into blurs and more suffering :(
Now to be honest, black wasn't black, red was dull, but this could be the result of my VGA output to a V8 videomixer which went composite to the LS 150 processor from Pixelscreen and the rather old P16 screens which were used, so to figure this out I am going to try this at home with my buddy, trying to recreate the situation, but his output from VDMX, both converted from displayport to composite and into the V8 had a black that was black and bright red instead of the dull colors I was having, using the same visuals...
Furthermore he could alter the color, brightness and contrast settings on some kind of master output module, something resolume doesn't have...
So lucky me, around 8PM that night I wne ton to the last gig of the weekend, in a club, different music, just 2 small P8 screens and DVI in, this worked perfectly, black was black, colors bright, very bright and the slicing was just to put my screen into the smaller ones on stage and over the night from 12 until 5 resolume worked flawless...

So to put things in perspective, and hoping to learn more and more from you guys, here's the setup of my resolume..
Image
It's a lot I know, I use standard 5 layers, with the 6th reserved for logo's and DJ names, mostly the layers are filled until column 40 or 50 or so, I have preprogrammed and mapped 21 effects and mostly everything is set to 1024x768, the fifth layer is reserved for the resolume built in stuff, lines, flashy bars, beat driven squares and crosses etc. the other 4 layers are filled with loops and here is where my buddy and I have a big discussion going, I carry with me around 9000 loops on my hard-drive, of course I don't use them all but they are there so in my mind, resolume just reads the clips who are loaded in the deck and the rest is ignored until I load them into a deck, where my buddy thinks resolume keeps scanning this collection of loops over and over again when the loops I use are needed to play and this would be so much that resolume decides to go f*ck yourself and quits :|
So am I pushing my machine to hard? Should I cut on the number of FX? Is there something I should do different? Of course all loops (well most of them) are in DXV and I use big folders, not 5 loops a folder but 40 or 80 or sometimes more but also sometimes just 6, is this something that drives resolume crazy?
One more thing, the FX I use are always on the whole composition, only the built in generated visuals use FX on the clip....

So until this it's about resolume, now after this problem, viewtopic.php?f=12&t=11024 , where I had problems with a stuttering preview, I took the big step forward and bought myself a brand new Macbook retina, selling a kidney, I could afford myself this setup;
Image
And it's used solo for resolume, so there's some software, resolume of course and half the disk is filled with loops, and that's it, so the Friday and Saturday night I used an Apple converter from thunderbolt to VGA and Saturdaynight an Apple converter to DVI, I use a licenced Resolume Arena 4.1.8 and a Akai APC 40 as controller, the midi setup I use and the .AVC are copied from my windows machine since I wanted to have al my FX and the resolume generated visuals transfered from windows to my mac.

So here it is, my rant from this weekend, I was fairly disappointed to say the least about the performance and I really hope to get a shitload of input here that will get me in the right direction...
I know I push the machine hard, but after all it's a very very powerful computer and where my old setup (Asus G74) was getting rusty with the previewing etc, it was no problem to run resolume, cinema4D and after effects and photoshop at the same time, being on facebook and chatting on skype, so I had high hopes for the mac which are pretty much down the drain now... :|

PS; is it me, or is there no way to select multiple columns at once to remove them? Sometimes I load like 200 clips in a row and cut and paste them into place, something that also makes resolume crash, but then I end up with 50 used columns and 150 unused columns which I need to remove one by one...

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cosmowe
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Re: Resolume crashed way to many times this weekend....

Post by cosmowe »

Hi Yuckfou157,
I can't write you anything about your videoquality problem...maybe someone else can do ;)
///
While I was reading your post...I realised that you are describing almost exactly an crash issue I ran into couple of times. Lucky....only at the office preparing the show.

In this picture...
scrollbar.png
...it looks like you have 200-300 used or unused columns. Resolume can crash with to many used or unused columns. Every time I ran to it, because I flooded my deck...I deleted every unused column behind my clips and checked if it run stable. Saving and loading a composition with to many columns or clips mostly crashes Resolume. After thinning out my set....it works perfectly!

You can not delete several columns at once....only one after the other :cry:

That's my first guess!

My other guess!...you wrote...
Of course all loops (well most of them) are in DXV
On a job I had serious troubles with a crashing Resolume system while the rehearsals. It was a corporate show where the quality of one special DXV compressed video in my comp wasn't good enough for the client. So I coded it to QT Animation because of the better imagequality. QTA is not a VJ friendly codec..I know. You would not be able to scrub the clip forward and backwards with high performance. But that shouldn't matter....I should only play it ones from the beginning to the end. It worked....a couple of times...

But then Resolume starts crashing...with no special reason...at random points of the rehearsal. The whole day...I had problems with crashes.
Because it was a comparatively small composition and the QT Animation clip was the only thing which was different to my common comps.... I removed it...saved and reloaded the composition. And voilá. No crashes any more.

In your case it must not be a QT Animation clips which causes the crashes.....If my first guess doesn't work...try to delete ALL clips from your comp which are not DXV. And stress test your system again.

In the past I also had corrupt clips which instantly crashed Resolume...but I would guess you would have noticed an issue like that.

Hope I offered you something you can work with!?


Greetings
cosmowe
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dirtyjohn_lv
Is seriously in love with Resolume. Met the parents and everything
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Re: Resolume crashed way to many times this weekend....

Post by dirtyjohn_lv »

Corrupt clips/to many per deck.

I ran into an issue last week during a corporate event where the client showed up with about 30-40 high resolution images (over 2000px).

I could only load about 10-15 depending on the order just because of the pixel resolution.

I watched the on board memory (64GB available) slowly creep up with every image and would crash as soon as usage went over 8GB

Joris
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Re: Resolume crashed way to many times this weekend....

Post by Joris »

I'm sorry to hear you had such a bad Kingsday experience.

I can say with 99% certainty that your problems with crashing are related to the size of your deck and your non-DXV encoded clips. It has nothing to do with the amount of effects or the clips you have on your computer.

When you are loading 200+ clips into a deck, basically you are doing the same thing as selecting 200 clips in Finder and double clicking them. Give it a try, and you'll see Quicktime Player sputter and die. I don't know of any software that can handle this much data without at least a little hickup.

This is why we recommend to limit decks to around 40-50 clips. If you use DXV exclusively ( which means *only* DXV, not just 'mostly' DXV ), you can get away with more. But the 50 clip limit is a good rule of thumb.

Btw, try dragging new clips over a column header instead of a layer... :o

Your other problems are mostly hardware related and not to do with Resolume, but I'll try to give some pointers.
everything was 5 or 10 points/pixel different from the drawing
Pixel mapping through a V8 is never going to be accurate. The pixel coordinates you get from the LED supplier are based on a digital connection. The moment you connect to the processor through an analog mixer, these figures are never going to match. I once had a setup like this, where switching between white and red caused the image to move 5 pixels horizontally.

The best way to deal with it, is to connect via DVI. If you absolutely have to use a V8, ask the LED supplier to keep a 10-20 pixel gap between the screens in the processor. This will give you some room to breath.
shading, shadows, lines turning into blurs and more suffering
This is another digital to analog conversion problem. You can try to compensate by adding a few effects like Levels or Brightness/Contrast on the composition ( this is basically what your buddy did in VDMX ), but when noise is added on the signal after the laptop, Resolume cannot compensate for everything.

When connecting to LED, especially when Frank gives you his old 16 mil screens and his older processors, you'll want to keep it all DVI. The V8 is a nice mixer, but it's horribly outdated when your signal flow is not 100% composite video based.

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Yuckfou157
Hasn't felt like this about software in a long time
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Joined: Wed Mar 28, 2012 16:02

Re: Resolume crashed way to many times this weekend....

Post by Yuckfou157 »

At first, thank you all for answering, I know some things are more n00b related than others, but there is no n00b section in the forum so I am very happy with you peepz taking the time to answer my questions.
Second, I will stick to Resolume of course, it's my first love in VJ'ing and implementing the new ideas you people gave me will raise the bar for myself in quality visuals 8-)
cosmowe wrote: ...it looks like you have 200-300 used or unused columns. Resolume can crash with to many used or unused columns. Every time I ran to it, because I flooded my deck...I deleted every unused column behind my clips and checked if it run stable. Saving and loading a composition with to many columns or clips mostly crashes Resolume. After thinning out my set....it works perfectly!

You can not delete several columns at once....only one after the other :cry:
I know, therefor the PS was:
Yuckfou157 wrote:
PS; is it me, or is there no way to select multiple columns at once to remove them? Sometimes I load like 200 clips in a row and cut and paste them into place, something that also makes resolume crash, but then I end up with 50 used columns and 150 unused columns which I need to remove one by one...
;)
dirtyjohn_lv wrote:Corrupt clips/to many per deck.
I think Especially now Joris has explained how the clips are handled that that is one of my big mistakes, and I'm lucky things have run so smooth for so long, my "older" standard decks had 125 clips in them, 5 layers with 25 loops...
Joris wrote:I'm sorry to hear you had such a bad Kingsday experience.
Thank you, but it's not your fault and even crancky about my gear, I had a blast :mrgreen:
Joris wrote:
I can say with 99% certainty that your problems with crashing are related to the size of your deck and your non-DXV encoded clips. It has nothing to do with the amount of effects or the clips you have on your computer.

When you are loading 200+ clips into a deck, basically you are doing the same thing as selecting 200 clips in Finder and double clicking them. Give it a try, and you'll see Quicktime Player sputter and die. I don't know of any software that can handle this much data without at least a little hickup.

This is why we recommend to limit decks to around 40-50 clips. If you use DXV exclusively ( which means *only* DXV, not just 'mostly' DXV ), you can get away with more. But the 50 clip limit is a good rule of thumb.
Thank you for this, now I understand how Resolume handles the clips, in my guessing it was pre-rendered thumbnails and loops where actually loaded/started when clicked, but this is something very different...
The 50 loop max is something I have to learn to work with, but when it improves stability nothing is too much trouble :)
And it's gonna be a whole lotta work to find them, but I will make sure that next time everything is absolutely in DXV...
Joris wrote:
Btw, try dragging new clips over a column header instead of a layer... :o
I understand the difference, but it's loading 5 loops instead of forty as I was used to ;)
I'll try working that way, but still there is the question of removing not used columns :mrgreen:
Joris wrote: Your other problems are mostly hardware related and not to do with Resolume, but I'll try to give some pointers.
Thank you for this comprehensive explanation, it's very useful and although I saw the big difference between the P16 in day and the DVI driven P8 at night this is very useful, we'll have to figure out how this can be handled the best, I know we're looking into buying a V40 HD but as always with the videogear, it's a ton of money to spend so I don't know when this is going to happen...
So until then it's VGA to the V8 and I have to suffer the consequences :lol:

PS Joris...with my transfer to Mac, I really miss my Plexus FFGL...any chance to get a Mac version somewhere? :roll:

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