[QLab] Video out of sync, slow to fire, sometimes doesn't fire cues.

[lee webster]

I am running the latest version of Qlab on my Mac Book Pro (2.6 GHz, 2GB ram) with videos running to two projectors and I am experiencing several problems:

1. All cues, sound and video, are slow to start when the cue is pressed.
2. The beginning of videos are jumpy and often skip the first few frames.
3. Videos with synchronized sound are out of sync to varying degrees.
4. Sometimes cues fail to fire when pushed.
5. Qlab freezes occasionally and must be force quit and restarted.


Although cues often involve two simultaneous videos running to different screens I have each one going to its projector in full screen mode (no custom geometry) as I've seen recommended.  Video files are Quicktime, largest one is 8GB, most are much smaller.

Can anyone offer any help?  A different export codec?  Should I put video files on an external drive?  I just read that reducing display resolution may help.  I will try that this afternoon.

Thanks so much for any help you can give,

Lee

[Ted Pallas]

How are you getting two outputs?  What file type are you using?  I love love love photo-jpeg...

Ted Pallas
Live Media Designer
Sandwich Construction Consultant
ted dot pallas -at- gmail dot com
516.286.9661

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[Christopher Ashworth]

On Feb 10, 2011, at 3:53 PM, lee webster wrote:

> I am running the latest version of Qlab on my Mac Book Pro (2.6 GHz, 2GB ram) with videos running to two projectors and I am experiencing several problems:

Several things to consider:

- 2GB may not be enough RAM, or at least it may be contributing to bottlenecks if other factors are not also optimized.

- Are you using a Matrox device? If so this does come with the tradeoff that a single graphics card is driving more pixels, thus reducing the capacity.

- What resolution on the projectors, and what resolution in the video files? If too high, combined with less RAM and one graphics card, this may lead to bottlenecks. Reducing the number of pixels will reduce the load.

- Are all still images explicitly stopped when no longer needed?

- What codec? Common choices are PhotoJPG and H.264.

- What speed hard drive? 7200 would be a desirable minimum, SSD is optimum.

- How many video cues are being simultaneously loaded? (i.e. how long are the cue sequences, with how many cues that are loaded together) Using Load cues to preload key sequences may help.

Best,
Chris

[David Kolenda]

I had an issue once before with system hangs. I wound up have to use the previous build. It didn't solve all of my problems, but the system hangs stopped.

[Christopher Ashworth]

On Feb 10, 2011, at 4:52 PM, David Kolenda wrote:

> I had an issue once before with system hangs. I wound up have to use the previous build. It didn't solve all of my problems, but the system hangs stopped.

Which version numbers were involved?

-C

[Geoff Hollingshead]

I was having a similar issue back in the fall on a Mac mini. Part of your issue could be ram related (or lack of ram) especially with video cues.

Does your MBP have a separate graphics card or integrated graphics?

I also tried reducing the resolution of my projectors which did help a bit but still didn't resolve the issues.

Cheers

Geoff

Sent from my iPhone

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[David Kolenda]

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 4:53 PM, Christopher Ashworth <ch...@figure53.com> wrote:

 Which version numbers were involved?

I believe I was having issues with QLab 2.3.2 build 1154, and wound up going back to build 1152

-

David Kolenda 

[Christopher Ashworth]

Huh. Interesting. These two versions had only three lines difference between them, which fixed a (fairly serious) bug with playing still images in 1152. To my knowledge this would not have been related to hard hangs, but I'm not 100% sure. I guess we'd need to go back and recreate the scenario in detail to identify what was going on with certainty.