CPU LOAD

petemanos

Hi, I purchased ME yesterday and played out at a PACKED club the same night. I had little issues, other than the CPU load going to 100 every now and then. I only had the video freeze one time, it did not freeze the few other times my activity monitor showed 100 percent. Audio did not drop out. I know some videos use more CPU load than others, how can I determine which ones they are without playing them all? Also the combination of 2 videos changes so much it could be one or the other causing the topping out of the CPU%. I'm on a 2.5 MBP with 512vram and 4gigs system ram. Runs pretty darn good but I'm dangerously close to a dropout at times, suggestions?? Also how do I UNLOAD movie clips or images from the Media Bank?? Thanks in advance !

Nick

Hi Pete - did activity monitor show the number 100% (of a total "200%" of the Core 2 Duo) beside the MixEmergency name, or do you just mean that the CPU usage meter was maxed out? Have you encoded your videos yourself? If so - do you know what codec, dimensions and bitrate they are encoded? As a general guide on what to expect - on a MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz, with 2 GB RAM and NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 256 MB VRAM, playing 2 videos encoded as 640x480 H.264, I would expect the CPU usage of MixEmergency to jump between around 40% to 80% (of the 200% available to the Core 2 Duo CPU). Do you have Perian installed? Apparently it has a more efficient H.264 decoder than Apple's default QuickTime decode.

Nick

And currently it is not possible to unload clips from the Media Bank - you can however drag a folder onto the deck which will clear it. It is on the growing list of features that we are planning to implement. Also - if you install Perian, I believe that you have to enable the H.264 decoder through the Terminal application using the following: defaults write org.perian.Perian DecodeAllProfiles -bool true and if you want to go back to the default: defaults delete org.perian.Perian DecodeAllProfiles

petemanos

I am using Perian, however I was unaware of having to enable h.264 control in Terminal. I have my activity monitor CPU percentage always floating above my programs and yes, I do mean 200 percent meaning both CPU's were tapping out. I do encode most of my videos from DVD, however not all of them. I've had VSL for over a year and have managed to keep things running VERY smooth, up to 7 days a week. I PLAY ALOT. Anyway, the videos I encode personally are 640x480, around 3.5mbps, h.264 in either MOV or mp4 format. Other's I get from a couple VJ record pools could be all over the place. I haven't had much issues running VSL with some of these videos that eat up more cpu, but now that I'm running out of headroom running ME, its a concern again. I'm on my 2nd laptop for just this reason !! I have a 2.4, and a 2.5 , 15 and 17inchers. I'll be doing extensive flogging of the system all day today ! Thanks for a quick response, I look forward to this software getting better and better. VJ BLAZE vjblaze.com

Nick

It looks as though you are encoding your videos at fairly good settings. If you're already familiar with VSL, then assume that you're also aware that you should add (and have been adding) keyframes every 30 or so frames to the video. It could be possible that large distances between the keyframes could be causing higher than normal CPU usage. Do any warnings display in the Messages Window of MixEmergency after you've played a bunch of videos? Or do you play your videos at extreme pitches (e.g. are you pitch bending songs greater than +20%)? Also - Scratch Live 1.9.1 was released today and the release notes state "Made some optimizations to quicktime file decoding". I haven't noticed any difference myself, but this may also help to reduce the use of your CPU. Let me know how you get on playing your videos today.

petemanos

I've only had a couple video's pop up the warning about the keyframe spacing. Literally, a couple, or two. I encode my scratch sample videos where each frame is a keyframe. I was about to post what spacing you guys recommended. Overall I'm pleased so far with the software, 3 hours tonight, one short usb audio dropout when I got the warning about the keyframe spacing, and one when I got a too little ram warning. All understandable and easily correctable. Let me say this, it seems to me ME just requires more processing power to work. I don't know why this is as it is performing very similar actions to VSL. I'm not a programmer. I know running VSL on my 2.5 MBP with 512Vram and 4gig ram I ALMOST never had any screen freezes from cpu maxing out. I seemed to have more headroom when running VSL. I believe it is the individual mp4's themselves that just use more CPU overheard. I was hovering near topping out about 67-70 percent of the time, my eyes are glued to it. Some video's by themselves with the other deck empty still had a higher than expected CPU load. ******Does ME just require more processing power?***** Seems to be from what I've read on other forums. Problem is if I have 2 videos playing where both videos use a higher than average cpu load, I run the risk of the video freezing output first, then the audio dropping out if it's REALLY bad(this hasn't happened yet, audio dropouts only occur on major problems like the ram warning). AGAIN it is safer and I have more HEADROOM on my CPU when running regular VSL. My laptop screen doesn't run super smooth always and I lowered the screen rate to 30, but thats not a huge deal as long as it's not locking up the waveform. Just the general slowdown. When I first load a track I have that initial CPU surge that can cause playback problems. This is more pronounced under ME. I like to change tracks a lot and quickly, this kinda slows me down a little bit. This is a problem. If I had the money I'd snap up a new 2.9 MBP, I bet it would have better CPU headroom and be WAY less likely to freeze video output. These are my observations from my first two nights out. I like the product and its features but the processing issue is a concern. I imagine this can improve in the future? How can I identify how much CPU overhead all my videos have so I can re-encode the offending ones....? THANKS ALOT, I know this is long. VJ BLAZE

Nick

That's strange - usually we get the opposite report (i.e. people that have had poor performance with VSL have been able to use ME). I would be interested to know what output settings you are using in ME. For example, what are the output dimensions of your output monitor - and what do you have the Quality slider set to in the preferences? If you can bring up MixEmergency's Info Window while you're DJing - could you check to see what the Output FPS reads, and also the Pipeline dimensions? (you could also just email me the file at ~/Movies/MixEmergency/MixEmergency.log - which will contain those dimensions) Also - maybe you could tell me what quality/cache sizes you were using for VSL? If you have Activity Monitor open I would be interested to know the average CPU usage for the MixEmergency, Scratch Live and WindowServer processes (you may have to select "All Processes" from the process popup menu in the toolbar of Activity Monitor). Hopefully this will help us get to the bottom of this problem.

Nick

Oh, and another quick question - do you have any of the overlays (text, image or Quartz Composition) enabled?

petemanos

Yes I use the the Overlays, both the text scroller and the image overlay, no quartz. Again it works well most of the time, certain videos just seem to jack up the CPU percentage. I had the output quality at HIGH all night last night, pipeline 640x480. FPS I checked a few times last night, I have to switch computers to get at the log file for you. Under VSL I ran Medium quality with Ram at 2gigs. Where do I get the average CPU usage for those processes ?? Thanks

petemanos

My output dimensions are 640x480 on my secondary display (tv out on MBP)

Nick

Thanks for the info. There are still a few optimisations that we are looking into for 1.3 - I may get in touch with you via e-mail regarding these if that is okay with you. The CPU usage for processes can be seen in the Activity Monitor's main window - you may have to enablen the process and CPU columns, but these should be on by default. It looks as though you know what you're doing - and the output settings that you are using for MixEmergency are perfect for what you are doing. You may have noticed a slightly higher quality from your older VSL settings (I believe VSL at medium renders it's textures at 512x512 - whereas ME will render at the size of the output pipeline, which in this case is 640x480).

petemanos

Ok right on, now how do I check info on a batch of files? I'd like to drop a folder in, and get a readout of what files require more processing power. That way I would know which ones to re-encode. Is there any program that does this? I know in Mediacoder the file info displayed shows a CPU overhead percentage, but thats only for the file you have selected. I'm not sure even if this is the info I need. Thanks I know I'm close to getting this dialed in. got a 4 hour set tonight. Will report again late night. Thanks Nick, E-mail anytime. I don't always check it though, but I will check this thread everyday. Thanks again I like your product so far. I wish I could map ttm57 controls to it though, instead of having to get an external midi controller. I probably will be adding one however...

Nick

I'm not sure what would be the best way to check the info on a whole bunch of files (not one that will show the average bitrate) - I don't know of any program that does that. Perhaps we could look into creating such a utility at a later date - it might make diagnosing some of the basic video problems a lot easier.

petemanos

Hey there ! I figured out the problem. You may get a laugh, was not my intention however.... I had been starting both serato AND the VSL plugin, then closing the VSL window before starting ME. Obviously I was running two versions of the video plugin. I'm surprised my computer was fast enough !! Figured it out by using activity monitor. I guess I was confused on just how to run ME with Serato. I wasn't sure how ME piggy-backed off of Serato. Anyways, I restarted exactly as your instructions indicated, and all was well. I just had to NOT hit the video tab on serato........ Crazy huh.... ! Sorry for the confusion, was not my intention !! It ran great the rest of the night with a high framerate, audio buffer on 1. Thanks Nick ! How about a drop shadow for the text overlay? It would stand out more when on top of similar colors........ Thanks !!

Nick

Ha - yep, that will definitely max out your CPU. Perhaps I'll make that a bit more clear in the manual that you don't need to (and shouldn't) run VSL if you're going to use ME. Thanks for the suggestion. I'm interested in getting some sort of text effects (such as drop shadow) working too, but right now it is a bit lower down on our prioritised list of things to do - so I'm quite sure it won't make it into 1.3 at least. Let me know if you have any other questions, suggestions, or problems regarding MixEmergency.

petemanos

Hey thanks again. Aren't computers fun !!?!?

petemanos

CRASHED TONIGHT! Music kept playing, ME froze output, then shut down. I restarted ME and kept on going. Didn't have time to copy the bug report. Anything I can do to help diagnose why this happened? I was also recording at the time, and was about 3 hours into recording. Other than that worked great. Got me a korg Nano to control effects... AWESOME !! Thanks, cya

Nick

That's no good. Can you send me a couple of files so I can see if there is anything in MixEmergency we can fix, or let you know if it was the fault of a particular file. The files that I'd like to see are ~/Movies/MixEmergency/MixEmergency.log, and any files that have MixEmergency in their name in your ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter folder. You can e-mail them to our support at inklen dot com e-mail address. One quick tip - there is an application called MixLaunch in the Utilities folder of the MixEmergency installer disk image. You can use this application to launch MixEmergency, and re-launch it automatically if it shuts down (which it shouldn't do - but it's good to run this if you want to be safe).

petemanos

I emailed the general email the files u requested

Nick

Cool - thanks for that.