glitchy choppy waveform.

djgreddy

hey guys. finally moved from pc to mac. i bought a brand new mac book pro 2.66 with 4 gigs of ram and a 9600 gt 512mb video card. ran my first gig on it this past saturday. everything worked great except for the glitchy choppy waveform. some have called it shivering waveforms. i tried to lower the quality of output of the videos and all.. still couldnt get it to straighthen out. anyone know of a solution to fix this problem? alex

Nick

Hi Alex, Can you check to make sure that you're not running Serato's Video-SL plug-in? MixEmergency and Video-SL should not be running at the same time, as this will double the amount of work your computer does. If Video-SL is not running, can you let me know a little more about when this is happening? For example, does it happen all the time? does it only occur when you have an external monitor connected and MixEmergency is full-screen? what is your CPU usage like when you are running both Scratch Live and MixEmergency?

djgreddy

ill be testing it tonight at the club. ill let u know what i find.. also i was wondering what frame blending is? should i have it on or off. and is there a good setting most ppl use for mac book pros? like buffer and quality? any help is great. thanks

djgreddy

i have videosl enable but not running.

Nick

Frame blending enables MixEmergency to blend (mix) two frames together to give the appearance of smoother playing video. For example, if you were to play your video very slowly (let's say at 1/5 normal speed), then if you had a video filmed at 25 frames per second it would only display 5 frames per second in MixEmergency. Now, if your monitor is refreshing at 60 Hz, and you have frame blending enabled, then MixEmergency will (or at least attempts to) display 60 frames per second - and to make up the extra frames in between the 5 frames per second of the video, MixEmergency mixes smoothly between frames. To see what I mean, load a video and move it forward very slowly with frame blending off, and then try it with frame blending on. It is recommended that you have frame blending enabled.

Nick

The quality settings are dependant on the dimensions of the output that you are using with MixEmergency. Basically what you want to do (when in full-screen on your display device) is to open the Info Window in MixEmergency, and open the Preferences panel. Then on the Info Window you will see the two sets of dimensions: "Output" and "Pipeline". At "High" quality these dimensions will be the same value. We recommend setting the Quality slider at a value where your Pipeline dimensions are close to the dimensions of the videos that you are playing. So, if you have an output display of 1280 x 720, and have videos that are 640 x 360, then I would recommend setting the Quailty slider at "Medium" so that the Pipeline dimensions are also at 640 x 360. You won't gain much by having them at 1280 x 720 if your videos are at 640 x 360, and at 1280 x 720 your graphics card will be doing a lot more work.

Nick

Can you let me know a little more about how you have MixEmergency set up? Such as: What dimensions are your output screen? What are you using to connect your MacBook Pro to your output monitor? And also whether this is occuring when you don't have a secondary monitor connected (i.e. just running on your MacBook Pro with all the windows - including MixEmergency's output window - on the main screen)?

djgreddy

thanks nick for the all the great info. i played again this past saturday. sorry i couldn't get to u sooner. i made sure vsl was disable.. and i notice i didnt have to have it enable to use ME. this week everything ran smooth.. even the waveform. not sure what i did diff from the week b4. waveforms still not as smooth as if i wasnt doing video but the jumpy shivvering waveform is gone. im pretty much happy with performance. as for my connections. i bought the mini display port to vga, then use a pc to tv scan convertor which hooks up to the vga and output to composite/s video. i didn't get to check what my output window dimensions were... ill find out this week.. i never knew the concept of setting it the way u described.. so ill try it the way u stated. and ill leave frame blending on thanks alot for ur help alex

Nick

Cool - that's good to hear. The waveforms in Scratch Live probably won't be quite as smooth as when not using MixEmergency - as MixEmergency obviously utilises your graphics card to perform quite a lot of work - but they should still appear fairly smooth. You don't need VSL enabled most of the time - only to import tracks into Scratch Live (or you can also use it to associate video files with audio tracks). Let me know if you have any further problems (or any features you would like to see incorporated into MixEmergency).