I bought a licence for avenue today and used it for a gig for the first time. It was nice, but it crashed several times (which was not too much of a problem because I have backup sources). I use a macbook and as I wrote in an earlier post I tried to observe as closely as possible which behaviour causes avenue to crash. However it would be nice to hear from some other people if they got it running flawlessly on their macbook.
I have been reading a post where a user writes something about macbook being a big nono etc for vjing. I think the reasoning was that the macbook uses shared memory as video memory, in contrast to the dedicated video memory of the mac book pro. However I don`t really see the point. Sure, using shared memory is a lot less fast than having dedicated video memory, as the allocation structure of the whole system memory might change and reallocation takes time (this of course also happens, when loading new opengl textures etc). However, mixing three video streams is a lot of data, but with a duo core 2.4GHz and 2GB of system memory this is a task easily managed by the cpu and the graphics chip. In my opinion if the memory is dedicated or not does not play an important role here (in contrast to very high resolution, many-many polygon 3D cad stuff or even very high resolution graphic design). This is also noticable from the framerate, that doesnt drop below 40 something even with three 640x480 streams running at the same time (of course it will drop further for higher resolutions).
What I think that might be the problem with the macbook is indeed related to the memory but not in the way that the non-dedicated video memory limits the functionality of the opengl system. Recently I tested avenue in the mode without global effects etc. Result, no crashes (or at least much much later). So what I suspect is that in some of the code that does the pixel on pixel mixing there is a memory leak. Which means that at some point avenue writes into a region of the video memory that it is not supposed to write to. If you have dedicated video memory the system wont care so much about that, because all you can do on the graphics card is write garbage on the screen. So the card will (if it realizes the problem) just ignore the write command and continue working as before. For a macbook, that does not have the physical separation between system memory and video memory that is a different case. As soon as the operatig system notices an illegal write-access to the system memory (outside the region reserved for the graphics access) it might terminate the process issuing the write command. Ergo, Avenue just crashes (it doesnt even hang up the system, it is just terminated for security reasons).
So as I would suspect, as soon as the memory leak is removed, Avenue should run perfectly fine on macbooks.
One other thing, I think the performance of Avenue is really great. It runs super-smooth (if it doesnt crash). For me that is really the best thing about the new version. As I do pure VJing without sound, the sound features do not have much impact for me.
Usabilitywise the version is very different from the original resolume. Actually my ideal would be to have the old resolume with the new engine. That doesnt mean I think the new GUI is bad, but it just seems not so suitable for me. Of course that might change as I get more used to it.
Wouldn`t it be nice to have two resolume branches? One for people who want to work with audio and employ more complicated storyboarding / sequencing, and one for those who just want a fast and smooth tool for mixing clips?
Sorry for the massive amount of blabla
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