'System not fast enough...' question

General discussions and questions about MULTIQUENCE
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DaveG2
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Joined: Tue Jul 12, 2005 10:15 am
Location: Boston Mass. area

'System not fast enough...' question

Post by DaveG2 »

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.)
GoldWave Inc.
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Re: 'System not fast enough...' question

Post by GoldWave Inc. »

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
DaveG2
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Jul 12, 2005 10:15 am
Location: Boston Mass. area

Post by DaveG2 »

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
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