serious slowdown with video

red_wedge · Post by **red_wedge** » Sun Oct 15, 2006 3:03 pm

is there an optimum video size/format for better performance from Live? I'm making a soundtrack but Live keeps freezing for ages with the spinning beachball whenever I try to do anything. The cpu meter is only at 2%, but the software is almost unusable. I have 13 tracks of audio, but 10 of them are not active - I'm just using them as convenient clip storage/previews...so I hope they are not causing the problem.

I was just wondering if the video file should be compressed in some ideal way...

stale bread · Post by **stale bread** » Sun Oct 15, 2006 10:14 pm

stjohn · Post by **stjohn** » Sun Oct 15, 2006 10:33 pm

just make sure your video is compressed properly.. id recommend keeping it a very small filesize.. but issues like this are usually down to video compression settings. if you open the video in Quicktime or soemthing and it pauses alot on you well then u know its not compressed.

John Sweet · Post by **John Sweet** » Mon Oct 16, 2006 4:46 am

Avoid temporal compression that hits yr CPU hard. Just make a small (frame size), lightly compressed (& thus large) file & stream it off a fast HD. Try photojpeg or motionjpeg A at 80% quality, then try halving the frame size & frame rate (320 x 240, 15 fps for NTSC). That should help.

red_wedge · Post by **red_wedge** » Mon Oct 16, 2006 5:54 am

Thanks for the tips.

Well I eventually figured out what the problem was (or appears to be). I was using an external HD (LaCie FW800 BigDisk 300GB, with a firewire 400 connection fwiw) to store all audio and video files and Live couldn't access the data fast enough. I transferred the entire project to my iMac HD and hey presto, no problem.

However it is strange that the HD isn't fast enough - it works fine with Final Cut...

Ralf · Post by **Ralf** » Mon Oct 16, 2006 2:13 pm

I guess its this: the audio playback accesses
the FW HD with high priority. Video playback has
generally lower priority, and video requests to the
FW HD are delayed because the FW is busy with
providing audio file streams.
Video playback and user interface have the same
priority, this way the user interface is delayed by the
slow FW HD response to video requests.

Ralf

red_wedge · Post by **red_wedge** » Wed Oct 18, 2006 9:46 am

OK thanks Ralf - maybe I'll try putting the vid file on the Mac HD, and the audio on the FW HD...