Choppy video / playback

[jdissonant]

For some reason my new computer (Q6600, 2GB, 8800GTS) has very choppy playback. Luckily, it doesn't affect the audio, only the way it looks. For example, the cursor bar moves in steps instead of moving smoothly, when I'm recording or playing back. Even the Main and Sub counters (up at the top) move in strange increments instead of increasing smoothly.

Its really annoying when I'm playing a track back and looking for a certain hit but I can't tell where it is cuz the bar keeps skipping around.

[CaptainBoosh]

I have the exact same problem. I've tried different screen resolutions, and even a new video card.

I'm also using an NVidia card, but no where near the top of the line you are. Running 4400+ X2 with 2GB RAM with only a 7300LE (I'm not playing games on this rig or anything). No problems with audio, but the edit window is choppy.

If I have video imported, the video plays smooth and no problems there, but the counter and scroll is choppy. And the number of tracks doesn't matter, because one track with nothing plays the same as 20 tracks with video.

Maybe we aren't alone here and others are out there like us?

[blunderfonics]

I'm seeing the same problem with my new machine. It seems to be related to disk activity. On my machine, the frequency of these momentary freezes of the UI seems to go up as the DAE buffer goes down and vice versa.

My Machine specs:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
4G DDR2 800 RAM
320 Gig Seagate Barracuda SATA (2x: OS/PT and Audio)
HIS Hightech Radeon X1650PRO 256MB Video Card
Windows XP SP2
ProTools LE 7.3.1 cs4

[CaptainBoosh]

Are you guys recording to the system drive or on a separate drive? Trying to narrow the problem down here.

[gerax]

Hi
I'm on the same CPU (Athlon 4400X2 with 2Gb Ram) but I can easily have smooth video playback, even with high track counts. I have a Matrox P750 video card.
Yes, the first thing to try if you haven't already done it, is to hide the video track from the timeline. That should help smooth the playback out a bit.
Then, the video file should reside on a separate drive than the audio, and possibly not the boot drive. Also, a fairly fast S-ATA drive would be better. Then I'd investigate in the video codec used, as some codecs are heavier on the CPU to decode and play back. DV works best for me, as it's virtually uncompressed. The files are big, but the video quality is great and there's virtually no drain on the CPU for the decoding process. I'd try Mpeg then and QT. If you are stuck with a particular video format just get something like Total Video Converter and transcode it into whatever format works best for you.
As a final note, a video card with a healty amount of ram doesn't hurt either.

Hope this helps

[blunderfonics]

I'm using separate drives for the OS and for Audio. They are each on their own SATA controller as the Master. I've tried putting them on the same controller, which resulted in no change. Nor did writing to the OS drive seem to have any effect.

It should be noted that I am not playing any video in Pro Tools, just recording/playing audio. The problem I see is with the Pro Tools meters and counters.

[CaptainBoosh]

Wow, stupidity hits hard.

I found a fix for me anyways.

AMD Dual-Core Optimizer Fix. I thought I had already installed what was necessary for the dual-core optimizer to prevent video problems in games etc. Turns out, there is a newer version out there at AMD's website (released in November '06) that completely fixed the problem.

So do a Google search for "dual core optimizer amd" and the first link takes you to their download page. Windows is supposed to have a hotfix for this but obviously it didn't work completely right, since I was all up to date with Windows' hotfixes.

If you have AMD. Obviously the Intel folks won't get any advice out of that, other than try MS's dual-core hotfix, it may solve the problem.