garageCube

[yves@garagecube]

From the last dev. meeting, it seems that it will be more likely next week...

[quatro]

Modul8 v2 its just too slow, it basically freezes my machine after a few mins of performing.. also when triggering clips, it makes small freeze-pauses which totally f.... my set.

I dont know, but ive been mixing with M8v2b3 and M8v1.. V2 just doesnt work for me. :/

I hope you guys get this solved soon.

[yves@garagecube]

Modul8 v2 its just too slow, it basically freezes my machine after a few mins of performing.. also when triggering clips, it makes small freeze-pauses which totally f.... my set.

I dont know, but ive been mixing with M8v2b3 and M8v1.. V2 just doesnt work for me. :/

I hope you guys get this solved soon.

Is it related to project loading ? I mean, does it happen after you loaded a project. Because this is the main problem that we fixed now.

Another important thing:

Since the V2.0, any movie that has a sound channel won't be loaded in full preload (decompressed in memory). This was not the case in the previous versions that have very limited sound support. It means that in the V2.0, you should remove sound channels if you want to get the best possible performances.

[chromafresh]

Modul8 v2 its just too slow, it basically freezes my machine after a few mins of performing.. also when triggering clips, it makes small freeze-pauses which totally f.... my set.

Is it related to project loading ? I mean, does it happen after you loaded a project. Because this is the main problem that we fixed now.

Another important thing:

Since the V2.0, any movie that has a sound channel won't be loaded in full preload (decompressed in memory). This was not the case in the previous versions that have very limited sound support. It means that in the V2.0, you should remove sound channels if you want to get the best possible performances.

Frankly I can't tell whether my my freezing problem is related to loading a project or not. During a show last friday we decided to try the release version despite reports of slowness and trouble. So I made a project and passed it on to my partner (with relavent media), and he loads up the project and it seems fine at first. Once clips seem to be loaded anyway, but he reports that after 10 minutes or so clip playback got very slow all of a sudden. What happens is that Modul8 accepts all key and midi commands, but shuts down any mouse interaction with the interface.

For me it took about 20 minutes to get these slow playback issues, but the problem sounds like its the same. The difference for me is I'm on a faster machine, and wasn't starting from a loaded project but a new one that I saved. I know that for one thing memory on the startup disk was reported to be low and Modul8 started choking up after I started getting error messages about not having space on the startup disk. My partner didn't get those error messages when he started having problems.

So I force quit and restarted the machine. (restarting was interesting here as I pushed to restart and it gave me my blank desktop for 5 minutes before I finally used the reset button to force a shutdown. And then it took another 5 minutes for the reset button to allow me to startup again. Nasty.

So after starting up was complete this time I tried relaunching and opening the project. The set was nearly over, but I got in about 10 minutes of playback without serious issues. The clips may have been slow, but I couldn't tell.

So to recap
1) One person used Modul8 without loading project, where, after 20 minutes of playback, the startup disk reports being full and the interface locks up and clip playback is very slow and the interface isn't accessable by the mouse, but is changeable by keys and midi.

2) The Other Person loads a project and after 10 minutes of playback the interface locks up and clip playback is very slow and the interface isn't accessable by the mouse, but is changeable by keys and midi.

Oh yes, and we don't put audio on our media files.

By the way we're both on G4 Powerbooks with about 1GB of memory.

Incidentally the reason why I decided to post this report now whereas I hadn't after the show, is that I was concerned that developers aren't understanding that it may be something more than just a problem with loading projects.
I've also had a very similar problem with slow clips and interface freeze on beta4, the same kind where the interface stops working, which for some reason keystrokes and midi still accept commands. It seems like a similar issue. Although I suppose its possible that its related to me needing more space on my startup disk.

-b

[yves@garagecube]

We are going to release an update next thursday. It is important that we have as many reports as possible by then so we can fix as many issues as possible. Thank you.

The loading project problem has been already fixed. Now we are interested by the triggering problem.

- Do you have sound channels ?
- Check how are stored your medias in memory (in info) ?
- What is the size of your medias ? Less than 30MB ?
- What is the preload media MB size in the preferences ?

- Other slow down experience ?

Chromafresh: please note that having a full startup disk in a unix environment is a pretty bad situation. All the memory system is based on pagination and went it cannot do it anymore the whole OS is toasted.

[chromafresh]

We are going to release an update next thursday. It is important that we have as many reports as possible by then so we can fix as many issues as possible. Thank you.

The loading project problem has been already fixed. Now we are interested by the triggering problem.

- Do you have sound channels ?
- Check how are stored your medias in memory (in info) ?
- What is the size of your medias ? Less than 30MB ?
- What is the preload media MB size in the preferences ?

- Other slow down experience ?

- No sound channels
- I'm not sure what this means... If I'm supposed to check the info of the media during the slowdown, it wouldn't be possible as the M8 interface doesn't allow any mouse operations
- Medias are mostly 1, 2 or 4 second clips with alpha. About 95% are 10MB or less... about half of those are 1 or 2MB
- 30MB

- Other slowdowns? This is the main one that stands out right now, 10 to 20 minutes into play, clip playback grinds to a near halt and the interface stops working. The speed of FX doesn't seem affected.

Chromafresh: please note that having a full startup disk in a unix environment is a pretty bad situation. All the memory system is based on pagination and went it cannot do it anymore the whole OS is toasted.

I had partitioned the internal drive to seperate the system and other files and things are a little tight. Even with only system and applications at best I have about 2GB free on the startup partition. Thanks to Netscape mail, I'm always fighting to keep the space open... maybe its time to consider getting rid of some applications... ah well...

[studioc]

Perhaps itsa the alphas, since I do not experience any slow down as of yet, but I haven't been using alphas, nor the animation + codec (I use Photojpeg) Hope this helps.

[yves@garagecube]

- I'm not sure what this means....

Well, it is for people who have triggering problems. It is possible that the media storage options change accidentaly when opening a pre-2.0 project. For example, medias in "Full Preload" mode are now changed to "Stream" mode which is much slower of course. It could explain the small freezes when starting a loop.

If you have loops that have triggering problem, you should go to the edit mode, select the media and then click on info. Then you can see how the movie is stored in memory. If it is written "stream", it means that it is streamed from disk and unless you have very long loops you should not have this mode . In this case try to select "full preload" or "stream preload" and see if fix the problem.

[chromafresh]

- I'm not sure what this means....

Well, it is for people who have triggering problems. It is possible that the media storage options change accidentaly when opening a pre-2.0 project. For example, medias in "Full Preload" mode are now changed to "Stream" mode which is much slower of course. It could explain the small freezes when starting a loop.

Ah. I see... well there wasn't really a triggering problem, more of a simple playback dropping frames issue. My partner reported 1f/s, and the project was built in v2 and not 1.X. The extreme slowness problem I'm getting after several minutes of performance, prevents using the interface at all so I can't even check the edit mode to see the storage option for particular clips when the problem starts happening!! I just tried opening up the project I was using last week and all the clips under 30MB appear to be (correctly?) assigned to "compressed memory."

BTW, I'm pretty sure that video input layers use memory even when they are "off." Is there a good reason for this?

-b

[boris]

The 2.0.1 is released now !
And several performance problem is fixed now.
Let my kow...