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Least CPU/drawing-intensive Background Clip Codec/s?
Hi Alan,
I’m still working on a Pentium D system until I can afford to upgrade. I at times use still photo stand-ins as background images for they are far lighter in CPU/drawing load. However this doesn’t work well at times due to certain pan/crop needs in the actually sequence in Vegas (v.8).
Early on, you strongly advised against using uncompressed .AVI and the like. I’ve tried to use lighter-footprint codecs like .WMV but even those slow PI down sometimes to very frustrating levels.
Maybe I’m dreaming but here is ultimately what I’d love to see as a possibility by making an analogy to the differences in Vegas when using Preview:
Some equivalent of Vegas’ “Auto” in Draft Mode. Dirty, even pixelated but far less CPU intensive background clip for PI. As long as it is all proportionally accurate, it really doesn’t matter. (I’m going to try to simulate this with a perhaps 1/4 or even smaller size resolution render of the sequence in Vegas and see if I can “blow it up” in PI.)
But maybe a video file is a video file and there is no way to reduce its impact on PI irregardless of codec, compression or image quality.
Whatever the case, I’d welcome input, suggestions.
Thanks. -
2 Replies
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I would avoid WMV. Probably my choices would be in this order:
1) image sequence (JPG, TGA, PNG)
2) AVI with HuffYUV codec
3) AVI with DivX codec
Also, make sure the “use new method of loading AVIs” is NOT checked. That will use the older (but faster) AVI loading code, but doesn’t support DV AVIs (which you’re not using if you use my choices above).
Note that this setting doesn’t make a difference for images.
Also, in the OpenGL page of Preferences, try it with the “do not use texture RAM” option checked and unchecked — see which is faster. Easiest way to do this is to start a new project, add an image sequence or AVI, no emitters, and hit PLAY. See what framerate you get. Then change this setting and see if the framerate changes much.
Alan.
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Alright, thanks. I’ll try all that out :o)
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