HEEEELP! How much can motion handle

[Lee Berger]

Motion’s real time playback relies on the GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) in your ATI graphics card. The better the card, the more real time playback. You can improve the playback with some sacrifice in image quality, by setting Render Quality in the View Menu to Draft. However with that may layers you might want to export the logo and then do the camera move.

Lee Berger
http://www.leebergermedia.com

[Nick Franco]

Thanks lee

i’ve tried reducing the image quality to no avail. the problem with exporting this is that once it’s rendererd i don’t think i can use it as 3D, it will become 2D?

i know that Motion Caches ram. Would maxing out my ram help it run faster.

the graphics card i have is only 10% slower than the quatro so i don’t think i can do anything else.

any thoughts?

Thanks again

Nick

[Lee Berger]

Nick,
Your right, it would loose the 3-D orientation of the individual groups if you rendered. Did you try reducing the resolution as well from Full to Half, Third or Quarter? I don’t believe that Motion caches its playback to Ram as in Boris or AE so I don’t think more RAM would help. I may be wrong on that. Perhaps someone else knows more about Motion and RAM. It appears that you have ATI’s second fastest card (the X1900 XTX seems only slightly faster).

Lee Berger
http://www.leebergermedia.com

[Lee Berger]

One other thing I forgot is that you should look at the pixel size of the elements in your project. If they are significantly larger than your output, you may want to scale them down and save GPU processing. Just a thought.

Lee Berger
http://www.leebergermedia.com

[Doyle Rockwell]

Hey Nick,

All of Lee’s suggestions are excellent, especially the one about prepping your source media to make sure it’s around the same size as you want it to appear onscreen.

As for the performance: you mentioned 40+ video clips that comprise the logo. Motion doesn’t stream like FCP; it caches the source media into RAM and then sends it lickety-split to the GPU and screen. If you’ve got 40+ SD-or-higer video clips, that’s a lot of footage to cache. Most likely, Motion is running out of system memory space and so has to constantly toss frames and read new ones from disk. If it’s hitting your disk on a regular basis, that will always slow things down.

Your project sounds pretty macho!

[Lee Berger]

Specialcase,
Could Nick benefit from more RAM? What role does the video ram on his graphics card play? Could it be that his project might be too macho for Motion?

Lee Berger
http://www.leebergermedia.com

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya,

As I understand it, media is first cached in system RAM, then sent to the GPU when needed. Motion will try to cache every frame it encounters in the system RAM, but the GPU RAM is more likely to be turning over. Sending from system RAM to the GPU is fast.

As for whether more system RAM would help: well, he’s already got 5GB, which is pretty boffo. The issue is the scope of media he described. Let’s assume his video sources are NTSC SD, at 720×486. That means that each frame takes up around 1MB of memory (720x486x3). Multiply that times 45 different clips and you’re talking 1.3GB for every 30 frames. As you can see, he’s bound to run out of system RAM pretty quick, at that rate. Which means Motion will have to drop not-in-use frames out of cache (i.e. not the frame you’re currently on) and reload them from disk, later. And that’s where the slowdown happens.

The thing is, any app will balk at the kind of project he describes. You can get the work done, it just won’t be playing back real quick. This is where project optimization comes in: pre-rendering certain elements, resizing source media, etc. Even a $700/hr Flame operator has his/her henchmen prep all their elements before a client session, so as to make it all seem like magic 🙂

[Nick Franco]

Hi Guys

thanks for your words of wisdom. i’ve been doing some home work and am a little worried. i actually have 120 streems of video.

i’v now captured some footage at pro ress 422 HQ as you’ve suggested and i’ll swap out the footage that will become full screen with a higher ress to maintain the quality.

i’m a little scared that when it comes to render out it may fall over (it’s happend once already.

i could replace some of the footage with stills when they are not in shot. i need high quality as this will be progected on a cimema screen.

i dont think that motion can work in proxies. i was toying with the idea of going back to afteraffects or nuke?

really good advise from you all. am i just going to be in for trouble?

thanks again guys

Nick

[Nick Franco]

one mor thing i will try and scal the pixel size down as well
i’ll keep you posted

Thanks

Nick

[Nick Franco]

one other thing apparently applications on tiger can only use up to 4 gig of ram so i don’t think ram is the answer.

i think planning the project out in fine detail is the only way.

doe’s motion use proxies or wire frame?

i does’nt look like it. i may have no choice but to swap to AE or Nuke if my planing doesn’t work.

Nick