GoldWave Inc.

While my system is not super-fast, it has dual 2 GHz Xeon processors and 2 GB of memory with fast SCSI drives... so I was surprised that I couldn't play back an intro / splash video.

It works if I turn off the audio. It works if I turn off the video, but it won't handle both together. There are a 3, 2-second Multiquence expands in the sequence with some cross-fading. The 18-second file is 217 Mb.

The video itself is 800 x 600, 30 fps, 22KHz stereo audio, CamStudio lossless AVI codec - plays fine in WinAmp (at 50% for both CPUs).

I tried shutting down all squashable applications and processes, but that made no difference -- this is Windows XP, by the way.

Perhaps one limiter is the 400MHz front side bus? It's a circa 2002 IBM workstation, built very conservatively.

Perhaps another is that the code doesn't take advantage of dual processors? During the stressful passage, one CPU is 75%, the second is 25%, so for some reason, Multiquence is not demanding all it can... ?? (Just noticed that more conventional video/audio in the same project uses less than 10% of both CPUs for playback.)

Lossless video codecs tend to require a lot of processing power, mostly because the amount of data that has to be moved around is greater than a lossy codec. A resolution of 800 x 600 is also demanding.

Another factor is that Multiquence does most of the video processing on a single processor. All audio processing is done on a separate processor, if available. Future versions will make better use of multile processors.

The "not fast enough" warning only applies to real-time preview. When you save the project as a video, Multiquence takes all the time it needs to processes everything.

Chris

Thanks, Chris. Even rendered out there were problems with the one section, but since it was an AVI itself rendered from a Multiquence project, I dialled it down and all is well.

And I'm glad to see you're thinking of future versions - Multiquence is about as intuitive as it gets.

Dave