IO-Playback stutters on viewer but not canvas

[Jeremy Garchow]

When’s the last time you reinstalled your drivers or updated the firmware and what version is installed now?

Is the dropped frames warning on in FCP?

[Shawn Marshall]

Hi:

Thanks for the reply.

Before I posted, just to be sure, I reinstalled the latest Io drivers, 3.0, and the control panel, 1.2. As far as I know all that is up to date.

The control panel says Processor Firmware 24 and Xilinx Firmware 28, no conflicting Quicktime files found.

I am not getting any dropped frames warnings from FCP. These brief, stuttering freezes are only visible on my NTSC monitor and not on the desktop, and only happen when playing a clip in the viewer, not when I’m playing the same clip in a sequence on the canvas side.

Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Jeremy Garchow]

Any chance those files have alpha channels? Funky stuff does ensue there.

I have noticed that some files do behave differently in the viewer as it’s a different output (or appears to be a different output, I don’t know for sure). Once the clip is dropped into a timeline, it’s regular ole 8bit YUV and plays just fine. It’s been a while since I have worked with an io, but I do remember this. The viewer seems to be some sort of other color space and more resolution independent than the canvas/timeline which is locked to a codec, frame rate, frame size and color space.

Sorry I don’t have anything more technical than that.

Jeremy

[Gary Adcock]

[Shawn Marshall] ” I don’t believe the hard drive is dropping frames because the video will play back smoothly on the desktop if I set the video playback to None.”

The problem with that Shawn is that with the Io or a Kona attached, it forces FCP to handle every frame every time, something that is not being forced when you are just playing back in the canvas/

Does it still playback when you set your timeline to Safe RT?

You say it works correctly when you use a fully rendered file- your clue is – the machine is not processing the content fast enough to handle the thruput needed in realtime when any rendering is needed.

is your scratch storage on your array on just in your users folder ( which may not be fast enough)

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows
Inside look at the IoHD

[Jeremy Garchow]

[gary adcock] “Does it still playback when you set your timeline to Safe RT? “

He’s saying it works in the timeline and canvas, it’s only from the viewer that it’s bonked up.

Feel free to use the term bonked up, by the way. Don’t know how far it’ll get ya, though.

I feel, but don’t know for sure, that the viewer is a different output than the canvas.

[Shawn Marshall]

Hi:

Thanks for all your replies. As a further test I compressed the Quicktime with the DV codec and tried playing that back. It played fine in the viewer and the canvas. I then looked at the 8-bit uncompressed version again and that played fine in both the viewer and the canvas, no stuttering on the NTSC monitor. I thought it was having problems playing back yesterday, but now it seems to be okay.

The Photo-JPEG version still stutters on the NTSC output on the viewer side. Also, on playback, the image on both the viewer and canvas is frozen while the Photo JPEG video plays on my NTSC monitor. The only way that I can get the Photo JPEG video to play on the desktop is to set Video Playback to None.

For both the DV and 8-bit UC versions the video on the desktop viewer and canvas plays along with the NTSC output.

So maybe it’s just a Photo JPEG compression thing, since it’s not “native” to the Io.

Shawn Marshall
Portland, Oregon