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Expected Resolume performance on laptop?

Posted: Sat Apr 09, 2005 04:51
by gpvillamil
Hi there, just wanted a quick reality check. I'm using a laptop with a 1.7Ghz Pentium M processor, and ATI 9600 graphics card.

With Resolume, I'm finding that I can have 3 layers and effects at 320x240, averaging around 45FPS. Pretty good.

However, I would really like to be using 640x480. I find that a single 640x480 MJPEG with effects struggles to reach 25FPS, and stacking up layers quickly drops it to 15FPS or thereabouts.

I have some other software (Pilgrim) that can manage multiple 640x480 clips on the same hardware.

Is there anything I can do to improve performance?

What kind of rigs are people using to gig with Resolume at 640x480?

What kind of framerates are typical?

Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2005 11:49
by continuity-B
Get an external hard drive and use it only for your clips. Go for at least a 7200rpm drive and stick it in either a firewire (firewire 800 is best), or even better external SATA enclosure.

Your machine is trying to stream all those clips at once when it plays them and higher resolution equals higher data rate. Your current drive which, I presume has your OS and Resolume installed on it, is probably a bottleneck - your machine can't get all the data off quick enough so it has to drop frames (I suspect Pilgrim doesn't stream but pre-loads to RAM, esolume does not).

So a clean external drive with a fast connection to your machine, containing only your clips, would I'm sure increase Resolume's performance for you.

Also, turn off all the bells and whistles on XP (fades, animations etc)for a slight performance increase and press ctrl-alt-del before you start to shut down all unnessesary processes like anitvirus, firewall winamp etc. if you have them. I once left norton running and it decided to perform a full sustem scan right in the middle of a set!

I've not tried 640x480 myself yet. I won't until Can get over 25fps with 3 layers. As I've said elswhere, 320x240 is adequate for a club (although I appreciate you would see the difference side by side) and I wont EVER drop frames for a quality increase. Smoothness is everything for me.

I am expecting my new laptop soon though...

P4~3GHz
512MB DDR (will upgrade to Gig)
Ati 9700 blah blah
external SATA 72,000rpm drive for media

...so I'll let you all know how it goes cos If I can get full steam at 640, then I will.

Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2005 11:36
by Anonymous
Pilgrim does not preload to RAM. All video playback is by streaming.

The difference with Resolume is that Pilgrim utilizes the videocard in the streaming process. Most videocards have hardware decoding facilities and most importantly, are able to handle copying of large quantities of data at high speed. Furthermore, using the videocard for data transfers offloads the CPU.

nkm/ Loosegoose

Posted: Sun Apr 24, 2005 00:57
by gpvillamil
Yup, I'm thinking it's the videocard issue described by Arnout.

Note that I'm using the *same* 640x480 clips. At 320x240 they play fine and fast, at 640x480 things slow down. Since they are the same clips, I don't think the hard disk is the bottleneck. (It's 7200 RPM already.)

Is anyone gigging with Resolume at higher resolutions? (And if so, what is your secret? :) )

Posted: Sun Apr 24, 2005 07:58
by MtB
processing the video clips different from their native sizes, also creates another operation. i am sure that your performance differes, if you use, process and output at 320x240, cos it happened to me,
you can check the system perf. status via a silly software of the windoze, processing and outputting in different res. makes a difference, at least for my beloved machine :)

about the possibility of the hdd bottlenecks,
some physics :)
if something spins,
and it is metal,
inside a metal box
at a speed of 7200rpm
and with electronic components creates heat
it gets hot :)
plus, mobile computers, gets hot under normal circumstances :)
if your disk activity is high,
dont imagine that copying and pasting multiple files at once,
windoze uses swap file
system calls files
applications running makes disk i/o
bla bla...
your disk also gets hotter

and when metal gets hotter,
they becomes enlarge :) not in huuge measurements but important for data i/o
so disks begin to slow down and not often but, stops disk activity for miliseconds
this is one of the major problem of the non-linear editing systems, because
when you turn on the computer, u use your disk arrays, days and days and days...
so the industry developed av disks, which have more tolarance

it is still a huge question mark for me. the laptop hdds at 7200rpm due to this heating problem. dual hdds at 7200 rpm? sounds great, but you have to cooldown the system very well... thanks to asia, they developed some external cooling systems for laptops :)

also, as talked and said many times before,
using the same disk for everything creates a real bottleneck due to the nature of the windoze.

any way
i just woke up
and
man how I wrote to long :(
sorry if I become annoying :(

have a nice day
going back to bed...

t.

ps: greetingz to vision impossible crew :) just wanted to say...

edit: saw a typo, corected, please forgive me for the others i might possibly missed...

[Edited on 24-4-2005 by MtB]

Posted: Sun Apr 24, 2005 15:54
by gpvillamil
Note again - the 640x480 clips resized to 320x240 are 3x to 4x faster than the *same* clips processed and shown at 640x480.

Since the amount of data being read from the disk is the same in both cases, the bottleneck is likely to be the CPU, since in the latter case 4x as many pixels are being processed.

So I guess there is no way to make Resolume faster other than to get a faster CPU? And by the same token, getting the same performance at 640x480 requires a 4x faster CPU?

Is anyone actually using Resolume at 640x480?

Posted: Sun Apr 24, 2005 22:43
by continuity-B
Originally posted by Anonymous
Pilgrim does not preload to RAM. All video playback is by streaming.

The difference with Resolume is that Pilgrim utilizes the videocard in the streaming process. Most videocards have hardware decoding facilities and most importantly, are able to handle copying of large quantities of data at high speed. Furthermore, using the videocard for data transfers offloads the CPU.

nkm/ Loosegoose
Noted.

As far as I can remember though (too tired to check) hardware video mixing normally only supports luma key and alpha mixing. Res uses software mixing so it can do add, darken... et al.

Sorry if that's irrelevant?

Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2005 09:34
by Anonymous
Pilgrim makes use of many hardware accelerator facilities. Once the frames are decoded, they can be subjected to various pixel level operations (in Pilgrim you can chain an arbitrary number of filters, like alphakey, lumakeying, bluring etc.) that all run on the videocard (using pixelshader technology). The CPU takes no part in this process and thus, no expensive data transfers through CPU-accessable busses have to be undertaken.

Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2005 10:22
by continuity-B
So Resolume could potentially work like this (faster) without losing any functionality?

Should we move this along to the New Features wishlist?

Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2005 10:33
by gpvillamil
Wow - Pilgrim's video rendering abilities + Resolume's interface and ease of use. That would be awesome.

My experience with Pilgrim rendering is that not ony is the video full resolution, but it's also using hardware anti-aliasing, so it looks really film-like.

The only thing is that Freeframe filters are not readily convertible to pixelshaders, if I am not mistaken. So the moment you called a Freeframe plugin you'd be looking at the CPU as a bottleneck once again.

Anyway, Resolume and Pilgrim guys are all in the Netherlands, why not join forces instead of competing, and deliver a revolution in VJ software?