Unknown Video Stuttering Issue

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Hex21189
Met Resolume in a bar the other day
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2019 08:49

Unknown Video Stuttering Issue

Post by Hex21189 »

Hey everyone, I'm trying to fix an old bug with a resolume project my company is working on where in a video of a snow storm we experience random stuttering every 5-10 seconds of a frame or two. Normally this is pretty hard to see on a traditional 4k monitor (personally I don't have an eye for these details so my artist coworkers have to point it out to me) but this is a pretty jarring effect when we project the contents on to a movie theater size screen. Basically the 2 or 3 pixel shift snow flakes experience turns into a jump of a several inches or feet.

Currently in my test environment I am using Resolume Arena 6.1.1 Rev61728. My contents contain 3 movies all DXV3.0, with sizes of 5.18 gb, 1.28 gb, and 0.7 gb, with 2 to 3 minutes of footage each, 30 fps, and two of which have 1080p resolution and the final at a weird 2972x1080 progressive resolution. The two 1080p videos are then layered on top of each other and rendered out to a 4k monitor (which is where we see the stuttering) and the weird one is applied to a weirdly mapped plane and rendered on a normal 1080p monitor.

So far I tried debugging my hardware and found that the SSD is running at a normal rate, rarely exceeding a 100 kbs transfer rate. Only 3.2 gb of the 32 gb installed ram is in use, of whicc 400 mb is in use by Resolume. Processing power is getting clocked in at 6-8% and the GPU of the 1080Ti card is running at about 17% with 0.7/24 gb memory in use. I also went through the NVidia Control Panel and set the 3D settings to optimize performance in Power Management and Texture Filtering.

At this point I'm not really sure what else to do. This use case seems well within Resolumes ability especially given the hardware it is running on but some how something must be configured incorrectly. I've gone through just about every forum post I can find that mentions stuttering and none of the suggested solutions seem to work with my projects issue.

Zoltán
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Re: Unknown Video Stuttering Issue

Post by Zoltán »

Try setting the composition frame rate to 30FPS in the Composition - Settings.
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Hex21189
Met Resolume in a bar the other day
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2019 08:49

Re: Unknown Video Stuttering Issue

Post by Hex21189 »

Hey Zoltan, thank you for the suggestion. Unfortunately we really need the output to run at 60 fps if at all possible. I did however try setting it to 30 fps and the noticeable stutter still intermittently occurs. No idea why.

I also just recently tried recreating the project using only the 3 videos that I mentioned and the issue is still present. The only other thing I can think to mention is that a couple simple effects were added as well, one for brightness and contrast to one movie and another for a mask with no source image (I'm not sure why we have this effect but I added it in for recreation purposes).

deepvisual
Hasn't felt like this about software in a long time
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Joined: Thu Mar 31, 2011 15:49

Re: Unknown Video Stuttering Issue

Post by deepvisual »

isn't the best place to start the footage?
If it's been converted or made badly you'll have judder you can't fix any other way.
test it in a different player.

Hex21189
Met Resolume in a bar the other day
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2019 08:49

Re: Unknown Video Stuttering Issue

Post by Hex21189 »

Hey Deepvisual, thanks for the suggestion. I actually already checked the videos individually using Resolume Alley and they seem to be fine. I should have included that in my first post. Sorry about forgetting to add that piece of information.

One more thing I should have mentioned is that two of the three video layers use the "Add" blend mode and the third use "50 Add". I doubt this causes much of a problem but the idea of alpha channels in videos scares the crap out of me. I am afraid of no man, but that alpha channel... it scares me.

swcreating
Met Resolume in a bar the other day
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Re: Unknown Video Stuttering Issue

Post by swcreating »

I ran into an odd and bad stuttering issue last week that might offer some insight into your issue.

On the mac I was producing content on originally I had Alley 1.02 installed with the 3.0.1 DXV codec/plugin. I noticed that all the content I was exporting from after effects that was supposed to be 29.97fps was showing up in resolume and every other app as 29.00 fps, these clips lengths were slightly longer than the 29.97 compositions meaning all the frames were being rendered, the files were just being flagged/conformed as 29.00 improperly.

I then installed Alley 2.00 (rev 1444), which also shows the DXV codec/plugin version as 3.0.1. After this I did a test and exported 29.97 content from AE it was now properly showing as 29.97 like it should. I thought my problem was fixed and I could just import all the previously exported "29.00" clips into AE, interpret the framerate to 29.97 then re-export them to DXV, however any clips that were exported to DXV before installing this version were broken and stuttering, not just in After effects but in Resolume and Alley as well. I ended up opting to re-render everything out of AE to prores first and converted to this "new" DXV 3.0.1 after.

An odd thing I found was digging into the DXV plugin files that were installed with Alley 1.02 is that they were smaller in file size than the DXV plugin files installed with Alley 2.00. So while they were both versioned as DXV 3.0.1 there must have been some sort of change to codec.

So for your problem if you have access to a version of your footage in a different codec I would re-export it to DXV using the latest version of the codec. If you only have access to this DXV format of your footage an option that might work would be installing an older version of DXV on a separate machine, if your clip then works fine then convert your clip to an intermediate codec like prores, transfer that converted clip to your production machine and use the latest version of Alley to transcode it to DXV.

deepvisual
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Re: Unknown Video Stuttering Issue

Post by deepvisual »

back in version 4, resolume and most other 'media servers' had a judder issue with playback.
This was finally addressed by a major upgrade at the very core of the software.
My memory of this is resolume never saying 'it's fixed' but saying 'it's better'.
Generally, video pro's still use hardware playback solutions ( BMD hyperdecks for example) for mission critical playback and use software solutions for other purposes..

Joris
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Re: Unknown Video Stuttering Issue

Post by Joris »

Video stuttering topics tend to derail really quickly, so I hope you don't mind I step in and address a few things
deepvisual wrote:back in version 4, resolume and most other 'media servers' had a judder issue with playback.
This was finally addressed by a major upgrade at the very core of the software.
My memory of this is resolume never saying 'it's fixed' but saying 'it's better'.
Generally, video pro's still use hardware playback solutions ( BMD hyperdecks for example) for mission critical playback and use software solutions for other purposes..
This is true in so far that computer based video playback will always be susceptible to other processes interfering. If another process starts accessing the disk or requesting a lot of CPU cycles, we cannot guarantee that playback will continue smoothly. This is where the use of hardware playback would come in.

However! We are in fact saying we have completely fixed smooth playback in Resolume. We are on par with any application on your computer: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=12904&p=71182. If OP reports that Alley is able to play back the file smoothly, the Resolume engine should be able to do this too and there shouldn't be a need for additional hardware.
swcreating wrote:all the content I was exporting from after effects that was supposed to be 29.97fps was showing up in resolume and every other app as 29.00 fps,
This was a bug with fractional framerate values with our Adobe exporter plugin that shipped with Alley 1.0.2, and has been addressed with the plugin that shipped with Alley 2.0.0. It was not a codec problem (actually the codec is only included for people still using QT based exporters), we were just not setting the value correctly in the first version of the plugin.

If OP reports that the file plays back correctly in Alley, it is not a problem with the framerate being exported wrong, since the wrong framerate would be baked in to the file.

It is however a good thing to be aware of, and thank you for posting it.
Hex21189 wrote:I actually already checked the videos individually using Resolume Alley and they seem to be fine.
Alley and Resolume actually share the same playback engine. Resolume's actually can be forced to be a bit tighter by setting the framerate cap in the composition settings. viewtopic.php?f=12&t=12904&p=71182

You mention the file plays back okay in Alley, so this is not a problem with our playback engine. Since Alley plays back single files without being displayed on a secondary output, I'm not sure how you conducted the test. Either way, I'd be most interested to hear results of the same test done using Resolume (playing a single file, without going out to a secondary display).

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