AE previews

[Tim Kolb]

Is the entire range staying rendered, or are you cycling frames because the buffer is full when you’re previewing in HD?

How much RAM is on that display card? 256MB? 512MB?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Jeff Kosmicki]

Yes, full range is rendered. My GPU card has 768MB of RAM.
I don’t think it’s related to the GPU, since the playback goes from 7FPS to full 30FPS, by just switching the Xena output resolution from 1080i to 486i.
Tim, do you get full-speed playback in 1080i, is this a problem with my setup?
thanks,

Jeff Kosmicki
http://www.toyraygun.net

[Tim Kolb]

Have you ever taken a small area and let it preview render and then play that range back?

You won’t get full framerate playback while it’s using the CPU to render in most cases.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Jeff Kosmicki]

Yes, I’m rendering and previewing the correct way, (I have been using AE for 15 years now). The problem is with the Xena card. I’ve found if I render and RAM preview a comp I get very slow playback with the Xena, if I uncheck the “preview during playback” in the AJA preview panel, the same RAM preview plays back realtime, no problems, even with 1080p comps.
So I assume this is not normal behavior (I hope not anyway) so I need to find out why.
thanks for the help,

Jeff Kosmicki
http://www.toyraygun.net

[Tim Kolb]

What sort of overlay window size are you running on your desktop?

What if you shrink the size and downgrade the quality? Does it free up resources to the card?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Jeff Kosmicki]

No it doesn’t help, even doing like a quarter rez quality makes no difference, and normally that would make a huge difference (at least in my experience with Axio and Decklink systems). It’s definitely not normal, I will contact tech support and see if they can help.
thanks,

Jeff Kosmicki
http://www.toyraygun.net

[Tim Kolb]

[Jeff Kosmicki] “No it doesn’t help, even doing like a quarter rez quality makes no difference, and normally that would make a huge difference”

…exactly. Weird.

Let us know what you find out when it gets solved please. I can’t help but think I’m missing something rather basic here…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Jeff Kosmicki]

OK, this is what I’ve found. If in the AJA preview window, I switch the color-options from 8-bit YUV to 8-bit RGBA, I get realtime playback for all comp sizes. Unfortunately this only happens with 8-bit projects, 16 and 32-bit projects will not preivew realtime, no matter what settings are adjusted. I was able to confirm this with AJA tech support.
So I’m guessing this is an issue with Xena and color conversion from RGB to YUV, but I’m not totally sure since it doesn’t seem to work in 16 & 32-bit. Also, I don’t know if this is LHi specific, or if the other Xena cards have the same issue.

Jeff Kosmicki
http://www.toyraygun.net