Pre-sales question

vjjustinallen

I am looking to transition from DVJ's to a software based system. I have a few questions. 1) Currently here is the hardware I can use for this. I am looking to see if it meets or surpasses your requirements. Dual 2.5 PowerPC G5 2 gig memory ATI Radeon 9600 XT Video card Video card specs: ATI Radeon 9600xt graphics card Specs on this video card are as follows: AGP card Frame Buffer 128MB DDR Memory Interface 128-bit Rendering Pipelines 4 Pixel Fillrate (Gpixels/sec) 2.0 Engine Clock (MHz) 500 Memory Clock (MHz) 300 2) Does your plug-in support MPEG2 files or do I need to lower the quality? 3) Given my equipment list what would I need to upgrade? Thanks guys!

Nick

1. I have not personally tested this sort of setup, but I would say that it should perform well - though technically it is under our current minimum requirements. The most demanding part of the process is video decoding - so dual 2.5 GHz PowerPC processors should do well. We recommend that all users download and try the MixEmergency demo on their system before purchasing - just to make sure that the software performs to your expectations. 2. Some MPEG2 files may play (depending on the 3rd party Quictime components that you have installed). Generally I would recommend converting your videos to h.264, as these files are able to be better handled by MixEmergency. Most MPEG2 files are not able to be buffered in MixEmergency in the most efficient way, so the performance is degraded (which usually becomes noticeable if you are playing in reverse). 3. Generally we recommend the later (2008+) MacBook Pros, as these have the graphics and CPU power required to allow MixEmergency to perform well with high resolution videos, while also leaving enough CPU for other processing tasks (e.g. Scratch Live).

vjjustinallen

Thanks for the quick reply Nick. I do have a Macbook Pro 2.4 Core 2 Duo with 4 gig memory and a GeForce 8600M GT video card in it. The problem is that I use this system for everyday stuff and it's loaded with applications. The possibility of cross-contamination is likely and that would make tracking down problems too complicated. Also I have over 7000 MPEG2 videos (VOB stripped form Promo Only discs) and the thought of transcoding all of them does not fill me with joy :) SO, let's look at this other system listed above for a second. I am assuming that I will be using the MPEG2 plug-in for Quicktime in order to make this work. (is that correct?) On the CPU side a Dual 2.5 with a 512k L2 cache (per CPU) and a bus speed of 1.25GHz should work I would think...but you know better. The graphic card is a bit slow and AGP isn't the best. This is what worries me I think. BUT, I could be way off base here. What's your thoughts on this?

Nick

I have not tested the MPEG2 plug-in for Quicktime. I've had several reports of users using the Perian plug-in to play MPEG2 files - but as I said before, the performance is lower than when using other formats due to the way in which MixEmergency can buffer the video. I assume that you are going to be using MixEmergency with Scratch Live? The problem with VOB files is that Scratch Live cannot load the audio from these files. Because of this you have 2 options: 1. Keep the files as VOB files and rip the audio from them. Then use the "Link to Audio" button on MixEmergency to manually link each audio file to each video file. 2. Transcode them to another format such as MP4. This way you will possibly lower the quality of the video and audio (though this may not be noticeable at all), but will have the convenience of being able to simple load the files into Scratch Live and have them automatically loaded into MixEmergency. In my opinion though, if you have a MacBook Pro I would recommend using it. A lot of our testers are using the same model MacBook Pro that you are using and report very high performance. If you are worried about Applications/etc from causing problems with your performance machine then you could always create a second account that you leave set up for your DJing. A lot of our users also use external hard-drives for their videos so that they can swap them between systems easily.

vjjustinallen

Nick, I agree and have switch trains (thoughts). And no I cannot do anything the easy way :) I have a Maxtor One Touch 2 drive. This is a 10,000 RPM 16 mb cache drive with FW400 ports on it. I have been doing some research and am going to be trying this. Creating a bootable FW drive and running my system off of that. In theory this should work, maybe even faster than my native system drive. The FW bus is not part of the system resources and I shouldn't have an issue. What's your thought on that?...after you quit laughing that is :) BTW, creating a separate account will not isolate the installed system files so I am not sure that this option will work.

Nick

Haha, that definitely would not be the easy way. I personally would not recommend running your system off your FW drive. It will be interesting to hear how you get on though. Just make sure you remember that you are going to be streaming 2 video sources from the FW drive which may take quite a bit of bandwidth depending on your compression, and that they are also going to require the drive to read from 2 different positions on the disk (which becomes 3 positions when you start using the OS from the drive too).

vjjustinallen

OK new drive if formatted and one of the cool things about it was the complete iTunes library copied right over with no issues at all. I will throw Serato on it tomorrow, play with it for an hour or so and then download your demo and see what happens then. One thought I had was this. Even if I used an internal drive I would still have the same three drive reading positions. I should find a drive speed and system resource program and read the internal drive vs the external drive specs and see what the difference is. Should be interesting. I'll start a new thread if you want me to for this Nick.

Nick

Yes, but if you use the internal drive for your system and the external drive for your videos you would only have 2 positions being read from the external drive.

vjjustinallen

Nick, In looking back you said my original post the system was under spec. Were you talking about the system or the graphics card? If it was just the graphics card can you recommend an AGP card that would work for me? (Using my Apple G5 Power PC Dual 2,5Ghz with 2 meg memory.

Nick

For now I would say both. We have set the minimum specs (these are the specs if you want to mix reasonably high def (i.e. 720p) footage) to be fairly modern hardware. This is because we have been unable to test a wide range of older hardware, and so are not confident of the performance on a lot of older setups. Technically the minimum specs are actually a little high, as I know that the later MacBooks (i.e. not the MacBook Pro) work fine, and I know a bunch of our users use them. I don't have access to a similar system to yours, so really the only way is to try it. The closest machine to your system I do have access to is a PowerBook 1.67 GHz, and I can tell you that it is definitely under spec (though 2 x 320x240 movies can work fine), haha - but that is so far below the processing power of your system.

vjjustinallen

Thanks Nick. As you can see I'm really trying to work this out with the equipment I have vs buying something new. I usually use 3 DVJ-X1's but understand the need to start moving into the computer side of things. So I know that my graphics card will not work...any thoughts on a AGP video card...or just any with 256 or 512 memory on it?

Nick

You say that you know your graphics card will not work - have you tested the demo of MixEmergency with it? If so, what problems were you having? I guess that I would recommend a GeForce 6600/6800/7800 if you need to upgrade - but again, I haven't tested a similar system to yours.

vjjustinallen

AH...I assumed that it wouldn't work because of only 128meg VRAM in it. I should test that out. Be back in a few days :) Have a great New Years!

Nick

128 MB of VRAM should be fine. I know that MixEmergency works well on the older MacBook Pro's that have the ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 - and that only has 128 MB.

vjjustinallen

someone was saying on serato boards that motorola chip would not even load demo. I'll try it in the next day or 2

vjjustinallen

Does demo download of Mix have any demo videos in it. Want to make sure that encoding is not an issue. I'll search for encoding specs here as well.

Nick

Perhaps they were referring to Video-SL? MixEmergency will run on the PowerPC CPUs. There are no demo videos included with the current MixEmergency download. I recommend trying the latest version of HandBrake (http://handbrake.fr/) to compress your test videos. As for settings, I would recommend trying the "Normal" preset - and then adding the option "keyint=25" (it can be another number if you would like, but I would recommend between 20-40) in the Advanced tab. You will also want to play around with the "Average bitrate" setting on the Video tab (generally a setting of 2000 kbps should be okay). One note when using HandBrake though: I recommend renaming the output file from .m4v to .mp4, as currently the mp4 file will perform slightly better with MixEmergency (this issue is currently fixed in our private beta versions - but we make sure that we test this sort of thing quite a bit with our beta testers before we release it publicly - so it should be released in the next public version soon).