Video stutter - please help!

[Pirx]

Some time ago I have upgraded my studio adding 2 monitors and some other gear. Than the night mare begun...

Please, check my setup in attached drawing "Connections" first.

Computer is Mac Pro 2.66 GHz Quad-core 4.1 (early 2009)
16 GB RAM
Graphics 2 x NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512 MB
Monitors: Monitor 1 & 2 (Dell U2412M), main TV (Samsung UE-46EH5000), VO booth TV (Samsung UE-32EH5000)
OS - 10.8.5
PT - 10.3.8 with Complete Production Toolkit

The problem is: when I'm working with video (and I do it everyday) the video stutters as if there were missing frames. Sometimes just a little, sometimes so hard, that I can not work. Sometimes, although rare, it is smooth. No rules here!

When it happens, the playhead in PT is usually also "jumping".

Furthermore, I noticed that the video stutters also being played with Quicktime, PT being quit. It stutters on the main TV as well as my two monitors. (The same file being played with Quicktime on my MacBook Air - 1,7 GHz i5, 2011, is smooth...)

Watching the floating CPU window of Activity Monitor I noticed, that all 4 cores are evenly used and the CPU usage is barely 50% (when stutter occurs in PT).

I tried everything. Different codecs with Mpeg Streamclip, uncompressed files, clean reinstall of the OS, changing connections, omitting splitter, and recently the Blackmagic Intensity Pro to display video on the main TV - nothing helped...

Am I missing something?

The only thing, that is sometimes helpful for a while is a computer restart.

Could it be that my computer is too old and simply doesn't cope with it? On the other hand it's hard to believe. Doesn't cope with playing film in quicktime?? Every "modern" computer is able to do it! Isn't it?

Should I than look for another computer? Or check something else?

Please help...

[Craig F]

a) video with embedded audio is not good
b) video should be playing off of it's own drive so the heads aren't jumping between the video file and the audio files
c) the GT 120 is a weak video card for video but he BM should have resolved that

[Pirx]

a) & b) I'm aware of that and comply with these rules.

c) Exactly what I thought. Therefore tried Blackmagic. But with no success...

[Craig F]

the BM cards don't have any processing on them, try tuning off your hyper-threading

[FilterDecay]

Man you guys are crazy.

No audio embedded video? like picture departments are going to send over something just for this special little flower called protools 11?

Anyways try waiting until your disk cache is full before doing any work. If I try to start work before the diskcache is at 100% I get video slow downs.

[Pirx]

Originally Posted by Craig F

try tuning off your hyper-threading

Craig, how do I do that? (I have tried google already, but could not find specific answer there )

Originally Posted by FilterDecay

No audio embedded video? like picture departments are going to send over something just for this special little flower called protools 11?

It depends on a project you're working on. In TV or commercial job, no one usually bothers. When making a Film, I always get what I want.

Originally Posted by FilterDecay

Anyways try waiting until your disk cache is full before doing any work. If I try to start work before the diskcache is at 100% I get video slow downs.

I tried different cache settings in playback engine, but it didn't seem to change anything so I set it to "normal" which is default, I guess.

[Pirx]

How about the upgrade to Mavericks? Is there any chance, this could help?
I recall that when I upgraded the studio, I also moved from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion... Maybe that's the devil?

[FilterDecay]

Originally Posted by Pirx

Craig, how do I do that? (I have tried google already, but could not find specific answer there )



It depends on a project you're working on. In TV or commercial job, no one usually bothers. When making a Film, I always get what I want.



I tried different cache settings in playback engine, but it didn't seem to change anything so I set it to "normal" which is default, I guess.

The fact that in avids bubble it would be ok to want people to only work on video without embedded audio tells me how out of touch they are.

The cache helps but again I need to wait for it to "fill up" or major slow downs on the video.

[Pirx]

Originally Posted by Pirx

How about the upgrade to Mavericks? Is there any chance, this could help?
I recall that when I upgraded the studio, I also moved from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion... Maybe that's the devil?

Ugh... Mavericks is not supported for PT 10.3. Sorry for stupid question

[FilterDecay]

Originally Posted by Pirx

Ugh... Mavericks is not supported for PT 10.3. Sorry for stupid question

mountain lion seems ok. Honestly I have had tons of trouble in 11 that I have not had before. Lots of cool new features but its messy. I would remove all of your plug ins and add them slowly back in as needed. I had to do a fresh install to get some kind of service. Also every time I mounted a networked synology server it would bog down 11 amazingly. Maybe check that as well.