garageCube

[apricotandpearjam]

hi.

im currently using resolume to program a visual show synced to ableton live via network midi. to put it simply i have created custom animations timed to 100bpm which i trigger to resolume in time with audio from ableton.

at the moment my clips are not playing back in sync... they are not horrendously out of time, but so much so that it looks bad to me. maybe a beat at the most... but this is too much.

i have a new macbookpro 2.66GHz i7 laptop, 4GB ram & NVIDIA GeForce GT330M 512MB dedicated graphics card.

my animations have been made using adobe after effects and are currently being exported at 1920x1080.

myself and resolume (who have been very helpful) have been doing some tests...with smaller resolution graphics which smpte and white flashes and the problem is consistent with these.... basically... it hasnt improved...

this makes it seem that its more resolume than the graphics card, computer or resolution/codec of the animations. im not sure?

i need to ask some questions from people who know more about this than me and see what feedback i get. am i asking too much from a computer?

i do understand that there will always be some latency when i get to the club as it takes time for the video to get down the wire, into the projector, out of it and into peoples eyes... but again... im not sure whether it is possible to have graphics in perfect sync with audio?

i did try putting ableton 180ms back out of time and it corrected the sync... but it meant that i had 180ms of latency when controlling live fx and hitting samples.

im thinking the next move might be to try it with modul8 and see whether it is the software.

can anyone offer any advice?

thanks, benji!

p.s how do i get in contact with the modul8 support team? is this the only way?

[paddyfree]

Hi

This is not a modul8 specific reply, but I would question do you have to use full HD resolution for your shows? - especially in a club situation. I would say it's using the 1080 resolution thats causing your issues.

The demands for resolution of an image viewed up close on a monitor and viewed at some distance on a screen are very different. For example, do you know that the projector is true-HD, capable of outputting 1920x1080 pixels? - most aren't. Unless you're sure it is, a 1920x1080 image is already creating an un-necessarily large bottleneck in your system.

There will always be a trade-off between image size and speed of triggering. I make all my footage in 1920x1080p but render it out to 854x480 for shows because perfect MIDI-triggered timing is very important to me.

Have you tried the modul8 demo with various size movies? Also, have you tried using a direct MIDI interface-to-MIDI interface connection instead of Network MIDI?

hope this is some help!

[apricotandpearjam]

thanks for your reply.

yes i think im going to export at 720 to quicken things up but tests so far have shown that it makes hardly any noticeable difference.

they have all been made to the ratio of 1920x1080 so they are widescreen.. if i render at 854x480 they will look squashed/stretched.

i should try modul8 and see how it differs from resolume...

i havent tried using midi to midi instead of network but i will.

i have tried syncing resolume using midi from other sources such as an akai mpc and i notice no difference at all.

i appreciate that this isnt a modul8 specific question but it may well be soon.

any other advice would be much appreciated.

thanks!

[paddyfree]

854x480 is still 16x9

Also, what codec are you currently using? The best for M8 is photo-jpeg.

[apricotandpearjam]

ah cool.

i thought it would be different to 720... apologies... im kinda new to this..

resolume likes dxv apparently but i have em all as apple pro res 444 as i need the alpha channel for backgrounds...

does photo-jpeg have alpha?

[paddyfree]

Photo-jpeg doesn't have alpha. A quick google search turned up this: http://www.vidvox.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=2547

Also check this thread: http://www.garagecube.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=190

Looks like PNG could be a way to go (with some caveats)

[The Midi Thief]

Using an alpha channel is also a bottleneck. I can see why you with wrong size, wrong codec and alpha channel end up with terrible results. If you are using the photo jpeg codec you can also consider rendering it at 75-90% quality since nobody would notice anyway.

As paddyfree says, png is the best codec for alpha channel but it's very heavy for the processor and you will get huge files. I only use alpha channels on smaller files (not full screen) and only for up to 10 second loops. So you could also consider cropping your media (but it makes them harder to position) and/or consider other ways of composing your layers. You could see if you can achieve the same results with lumakey or with the "add" blend mode and compare if it gets faster than using a video file with alpha channel. You should be able to test all this in the demo version of Modul8.

Support is support [at] garagecube [dot] com.