• Avid Media Composer

  HDV edit slow/lag, playback fine

  Posted by Daniel Raybin on June 5, 2009 at 8:36 pm

  Need some serious help. Any input or ideas at all would be helpful. The post is pretty long – b/c I tried to make it as detailed as possible.

  We’re working on some HDV projects. We are working in full resolution (1080i/59.97). We are also working on a TerraBlock system. It’s like Unity light.

  The problem we’re running into is that as the project goes along we start experiencing lag during the edit process. Meaning, any time we do an add edit, trim, turning audio playback on/off for a track, etc. Any time any of these actions are done we get and hour glass mouse pointer for anywhere from 2-5 seconds. Here’s the interesting part: playback is fine – no lag there.

  
  Things we’ve tried:

  Duplicating the sequence does not get rid of the problem. New settings do not get rid of the problem. Moving to a new computer does not get rid of the problem.

  I discovered a short term workaround: making a new sequence, then pasting the contents into it. It doesn’t get rid of the problem – it only makes the lag about 1/4 second. However, the problem is progressive. If we continue working in the sequence – it gets worse.

  At first I thought it was a bandwidth issue with the server. So, I did a transcode of the a problem sequence to Dnx145 to a firewire drive. That result was the same as the workaround – only reduced temporarily. So, that pretty much takes the TerraBlock server out of the equation.

  I deconstructed an entire sequence track by track. First, removed all effects – no fix. Deleted audio tracks one by one – no fix. Deleted all but V1 tracks – no fix. So, I was left with a sequence of simple edits on V1 only and the problem was still there. This sequence was short, around 12 minutes. There’s no offline, or corrupt media. It plays fine. But making an edit in this sequence still has the lag.

  Memory usage is fine: around 12%.

  I chopped half of the video off – and the problem went away. I thought that it must have been a problem with some piece of media in that half of the sequence. So, I replaced that half, and then deleted the original remaining half – the problem went away with that as well.

  We’re now seeing this problem across several different projects. However, only one project has the severe lag. The rest are in the very early stages and only do the 1/4 second lag.

  We’ve called TerraBlock and Avid, they don’t have anything. We’ve tried everything we can think of, any suggestions at all would be helpful. At this point, there are no wrong answers.

  Thanks for the help.

  Tech specs:
  WinXP SP2/Vista SP1
  Xeon 3.0 Ghz
  4 GB Ram (XP only addresses 3)
  MediaComposer 3.5

  Daniel Raybin replied 17 years, 3 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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