Re: Motion Loops as Background

[Charles Parcell]

You have to set the digital video's DTS (Direct to Stage) property to FALSE.

DTS tells Director to use as much resources it has to for the digial video to
make it run as smooth as possible. The side effect is that digital video will
always run as the top most rendered layer on Stage no matter where in the Score
it is.

Turning off DTS will allow you to layer the digital video with other sprites,
but it comes at a cost. Depending on the compression and datarate required to
run the digital video, you made have very choppy results.

[celosegui]

Thanks. It worked, but it's a little choppy. Is that dependent on memory or video size? How come Flash seems to handle it better?

[Macromedia]

Charles answer was right but simplistic.

In fact DTS means "no-composition" render mode.

For instance in case you have a digital video in DTS mode you should treat
it as a direct data transfer from a digital video player component of
Director to graphic card memory buffer. As the result, incoming data
overwrite anything what was written before, so you can't overlay any sprite
on top of digital video movie.
That comes from the old days of slow processors and low memory when this was
the only way to play smooth video.

Another way to play video media is non-DTS mode. Here all data including
digital video are first written to a RAM buffer wherfe they are composited.
This is so called "stage buffer". When the stage buffer composition is
completed, the content of it is transferred to the graphic card and you can
see properly composited image where one layer is on top of another one. The
problem is - due to cross platform idea of Director and other historic
reasons - this engine does not use any hardware acceleration, so it's damn
slow compared to what is considered a standard today. This is one of
Director's weekest points but managing bastards from MM do not want to
improve it as Director is not their "flagship" any more.
Consequently - in case you use non-DTS mode for digital video - you can
observe radical performance drop (e.g. 6 frames per seconds instead of 60) -
the whole presentation is not snappy while digital video is choppy.
I would say non-DTS mode is only good for very small digital video while no
processor intensive background operations are ongoing.

It seems Flash player digital video component makes some usage of hardware
acceleration as indeed - Flash digital video can be composited in a much
more effective way than in case of Director. On the other hand - there is no
"DTS" equivalent for Flash (Flash video is always composited), so if no
video composition is required - you can get much-much better overall
performance with Director's digital video in DTS mode compared to composited
Flash digital video.

Anyway - if you really need digital video composited with sprites - the rule
of thumb is:

1) If you can only accept QT video - use QT sprites instead of Director
composition. You can author QT sprites with application like LifeStage Pro
from TotallyHip.
You can get amasing results with QT sprites over QT video as you can steer
them from Lingo using AppleScript event handling interface (similar to
controlling Flash from Director).

Ziggi

2)

[johnpa...@gmail.com]

it's Depends upon Flash Handler How Much is better and Memory sizes do you have ?