El Capitan

[Patrick Spadrille]

Everybody knows they are not supposed to upgrade OS untill it has been certified by every software they used but anyway... did someone tried El Capitan with Qlab? 

[Nigel Hogg]

I tried it with the beta- all the audio functions seem to work fine- not tried any video yet.

[Alexander (Mailing List) Taylor]

I just tried a very quick test with video and seems to work on the public 10.11.0

Alexander

> On Oct 2, 2015, at 2:53 AM, Nigel Hogg <nh...@me.com> wrote:
>
> I tried it with the beta- all the audio functions seem to work fine- not tried any video yet.
>

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[Andy Lang]

Just for our now-annual reminder, we strongly discourage using any .0 OS release on show-critical computers, and discourage (although slightly less strongly) using .1 releases. 

Especially with an annual release cycle, there’s a high likelihood, and strong history, of bugs making it through to the first release or two, so you want to give Apple a chance to find those and fix them as the .0 release gets to a wider audience.

Thanks!

-Andy

—
Andy Lang
@SoundGuyAndy
sup...@figure53.com

[Kallan Roi]

Program a 120+ video cue show this afternoon on El Capitan, no problems at all. Although I will not be running the show on the El Cap laptop, the show computer still running yosemite.

[Rob Jones]

Currently running El Capitan on a 2012 Mac Pro with a Blackmagic Decklink Quad card running a theme park show on QLab 3.1.15.  No problems as of yet running 3 surfaces and some basic stereo audio.  These machines are also running Final Cut 7 just fine on the new OS, just in case anyone cares.

[Polona]

Hi,

I upgraded to El Capitain (10.11.1) and I'm now preparing a show with a lot of short video files.

I notice that there's something different with scaling.
When using Qlab the SD files sent to an external HD screen look blocky.
I'm attaching the screenshots which should be viewed on 100% resolution to see the difference.

When I open the same SD file in Quicktime 7 or Quicktime X and present it in full screen, it looks as it should look like - smoother, no jagged edges.

I get the same result in Qlab 3.1.9 and with the newest version (3.1.15).
I get the same results when I use Prores LT or h264 files.

I also checked on another computer running OSX Yosemite (10.10.5) and the newest version of Qlab.
It looks good there, so there's definitely something changed in El Capitain that's causing this ugly upscale effect.

I hope the Qlab team can adjust Qlab to work around this problem.

[Andy Lang]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 6:14 AM Polona polona...@gmail.com wrote:

Hi,

I upgraded to El Capitain (10.11.1) and I'm now preparing a show with a lot of short video files.

I notice that there's something different with scaling.
When using Qlab the SD files sent to an external HD screen look blocky.
I'm attaching the screenshots which should be viewed on 100% resolution to see the difference.

Polona sent this in to us directly at the support email address, but I realized I should share the reply here, too, just for completeness. The most likely explanation is simply that the two computers have different display resolutions, and one happens to be related to the media you’re playing in such a way that it can use what’s called bicubic scaling to scale the image up to the output resolution, while the other one is using some other method of scaling, due to it’s being a different size. Unless you’re comparing two identical displays, comparing one computer to another isn’t going to provide a useful comparison. The fact that both happen to be running different OS versions is likely unrelated.

Generally speaking, of course, it’s the best practice to make sure that the media you’re using is rendered at the final resolution you need to display it at, both for the best image quality, and the best performance, since that means the computer doesn’t have to scale it on the fly when it’s playing the video back.

[Polona]

Dear Andy,

thanks for your reply.

Sure, the computers I did the tests with are not completely identical, but I did my tests outputting to the same (external) HD display which I always use to prepare shows.
I've been using the Qlab for many years now and I did quite a lot of research of what video files play, and how, and what works and what not.
Offcourse I prefer to play HD files. but sometimes I only get SD delivered and that's not as nice as HD but it was never jaggy and blocky.
 
Before upgrading I did the same kind of shows on the same computer that now runs El Capitan and it worked fine.

Just to make sure, I tried also with two identical Mac Pro's (2013), one running Yosemite and the other El Capitain.

I see the same issue:
On Yosemite the Qlab shows the same picture as in Quicktime fullscreen.
On El Capitan the Qlab plays SD files blocky and jaggy while they look fine in Quicktime fullscreen.

Luckily I still have some computers here that are not yet upgraded to El Capitan.
They have different specs, yes, but they all give a nice smooth image when showing SD in Qlab (outputting to an external HD screen).

So my conclusion is that El Capitan changed the way Qlab is resizing video.
I would be glad to hear if there's someone who wants to reproduce the problem or someone who noticed the same problem.
I can provide a short SD clip if needed. 

[Paul Munafo]

So... Upgrade to El Capitan or wait. What's the concensus?

[Paul Gotch]

On 01/11/2015 13:51, Paul Munafo wrote:
> So... Upgrade to El Capitan or wait. What's the concensus?

If you have Firewire audio device then according to Apoggee then no as
they claim Apple have stopped maintaining their Firewire Core audio
driver. However many other manufactueres seem to be supporting their
Firewire products on 10.11 so it's unclear.

MOTU seem to be having difficulties with USB (they require a beta driver
for USB interfaces to work) and 10.11.2 apparently has USB fixes in it.

-p

[Mark Valenzuela]

Anyone else out there have any personal experience they could share with FireWire (or usb for that matter) devices not working with El Cap?

MV

[Patrick Spadrille]

Used it with Motu Ultralite Hybrid MKiii without any issues. But my M-Audio FireWire 410 stopped working. There is a hack for that using the terminal to deactivate some kind of new protection in El Capitan.

[Sam Kusnetz]

Patrick Spadrille wrote:
> There is a hack for that using the terminal to deactivate some kind of new protection in El Capitan.

Needless to say, we do not recommend doing this, nor can we guarantee
good results with QLab in a situation in which the OS has been modified
in this way.

While Apple isn't explicitly dropping FireWire support in Mac OS X, the
security changes made in El Capitan require manufacturers to adjust
their drivers accordingly. This is a very good thing! More security and
more stability is better for everyone.

Some manufacturers (notably Apogee) have elected to stop developing heir
FireWire drivers and focus only on USB and Thunderbolt going forward.
Others are updating theirs: MOTU has a beta, Focusrite has an update,
RME appears to have an update.

Several reports indicate that the M-Audio FireWire 410 doesn't work, and
personally I think this is a great excuse for people to upgrade away
from such a generally mediocre device.

Cheerio
Sam

--
Sam Kusnetz | Figure 53 Field Operative
s...@figure53.com

[-sc]

I'm new to QLab, but I'm seeing similar under El Capitan on my MacBook Air feeding external 1080p displays via a MiniDVI-to-HDMI adapter. It looks exactly like incorrect field order on interlaced video.

The very same video plays fine under both VLC and QuickTime on multiple external devices with the same hardware, so the problem seems to be specific to QLab, at least under El Captian.

I just tested a different MacBook (native HDMI) running Mountain Lion and the problem is not manifest. I'll upgrade it to El Capitan and see if it occurs on that hardware as well under the new OS.

-sc

[-sc]

Yup, it's QLab under El Capitan that's the problem. Upgraded the previously-working MacBook, and the problem surfaced.

-sc

[Christopher Ashworth]

Assuming VLC & QuickTime Player are still using the QuickTime framework, this points to a change in AVFoundation (which is what QLab uses). I.e. This is not a bug or issue with QLab per se, it's something that changed in the OS.

It's not really something to work around on the QLab side, as far as I can tell, but rather the source media side.

-C

(mobile)

-

[Christopher Ashworth]

Although that's the decoding side rather than the scaling, so possibly not. Hm. It's clearly not something we changed; it's an OS change, but we can poke around a bit and see if there's something obvious going on.

(mobile)

[sam kusnetz]

Hello folks

Thanks to a couple of folks who sent us lots of information, we believe we have solved the issue wherein video played at any scale other than 1 looks different in El Capitan than it did in earlier versions of the Mac OS.

Anyone wishing to try out this fix can get the latest beta here:

http://figure53.com/temp/QLab-3.1.18-b8.zip

This beta includes the fixes in beta 7 which we released earlier today.

Best

Sam

[-sc]

Awesome... I'll give it a whirl shortly...thanks for the interaction here and fast response.

-sc

[Chris Ashworth]

Thanks for the report about it sc; after I got my head on straight about it being on the rendering end rather than the decoding end (derp!) it smelled like an OpenGL scaling function had changed out from under us. Sean investigated and indeed, there was a place in the rendering path where we had been using a default scaling function which appears to have changed between different OS versions. Sean specified the function we wanted explicitly to restore the old behavior.

-C

[Aksel Gundersen]

I've got Camera cue image flicker with Blackmagic UltraStudio Mini Recorder. No problem in Blackmagic Media Express under El Cap or QLab under Yosemite.

BM Desktop video 10.5.4 (Also had flicker in 10.5.2)

OS X 10.11.2

QLab 3.1.17 & 3.1.18 b8

Capture source 1080i50 and 1080p25

[Chris Ashworth]

Hi Aksel,

I’m not 100% sure, but it sounds like this could be related to a bug we just fixed in a recent beta. Can you test the following beta to see if it helps?  

http://figure53.com/temp/QLab-3.1.18-b8.zip

Best,

Chris

[Aksel Gundersen]

Hi Chris,

Tried the beta with no difference.

Aksel

[Chris Ashworth]

Thanks Aksel — Could you write in to sup...@figure53.com (if you haven’t already) and provide some more detail about what kind of flicker you are seeing, under what conditions, etc?

Thanks!

[Sean Dougall]

Just one thing to add: It appears that the default scaling behavior in El Capitan has changed to be undefined—so where it used to default to linear interpolation, it now *might* default to linear, or to nearest-pixel, depending on the whims of the computer. So this is potentially an important update for anyone doing video under 10.11, even if you haven’t noticed any scaling problems.

Sean

[-sc]

Just had opportunity to try 3.1.8 which incorporates the scaling fixes for the issues introduced by OS X 10.11.... problem solved.

Thanks for the excellent response!

-sc