video playback jittery jerky stuttery

[hedgerocks]

Pro Tools 10.3 running on Mac OS Lion 10.7.3.
4 x 2.88 GHZ Quad Core Intel.
My session i dedicate 15 processors to pro tools. Leave one processor for the OS. CPU usage limit at 99%

Heres is my process for importing a video into pro tools. Convert to DV-Pro NTSC. Defiantly not an H.264.
Move to a dedicated drive for videos. Not on the same drive as my pro tools sessions or the OS.

Keep in mind these videos are never really longer then 90 seconds. and not that large in size to begin with.

I then move the video file to my second monitor and "fit to screen".

Typically everything works fine for a little while. Lets say an hour or so. But then the video starts playing back stuttery. Jittery. Whatever you want to call it.

This bogs down the session. Makes playback impossible.

I'll blow out the prefs.

That sometimes helps.

I'll restart the system.

That sometimes helps.

But there really does not appear to be any rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes everything works fine. Other times it craps out. This is unbelievably frustrating.

I've searched the DUC and various forums and just can't seem to make sense of it all. there appears to be a a lot of conflicting solutions. If one at all. Is there a definitive answer? Something I'm doing wrong?

Please help me geniuses of the internet.

[Chief Technician]

Update to OS X v10.7.5 and Pro Tools v10.3.3.

Change your # of processors to half of what is listed (8).

None of these are guaranteed to solve the issue, but together they are better for your system and help us eliminate other variables.

[hedgerocks]

I just updated protools and my os and am now running at 8 processors but still experiencing jitter/lag/stutter/sluggishness

should i just buy a support code and call avid?

[Chief Technician]

In Setup-->Preferences-->Operation, is there a preference for high-quality QuickTime playback? If so, have you changed its state and see if that made a difference?

[hedgerocks]

yeah - HQ playback is unchecked

I was very excieted for a second there. however that is not the answer to my problems.

[capt kirk]

hard to pin down. i run 10.6.8 SL with PT10 and run 25 minute QT's all day long , and no stutters or anything......not sure what type mine are, i just drop em into the session and go....i am also only running 32 tracks,ever, with virtually no plugins...

[Chief Technician]

Originally Posted by hedgerocks

Typically everything works fine for a little while. Lets say an hour or so. But then the video starts playing back stuttery. Jittery. Whatever you want to call it.

This bogs down the session. Makes playback impossible.

I'll blow out the prefs.

That sometimes helps.

I'll restart the system.

That sometimes helps.

But there really does not appear to be any rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes everything works fine. Other times it craps out. This is unbelievably frustrating.

If you are restarting the computer and the problem persists, then the problem cannot be a memory leak.

Do you have Time Machine disabled? Do you have Spotlight indexing disabled for your video drive? How much RAM is in your computer?

[hedgerocks]

We have 12 gigs of RAM.

PT memory cache is set to 5 gigs. Our sessions rarely exceeds 2 Gigs.

Spotlight and Time Machine are disabled system wide.

[Chief Technician]

You may want to keep Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities) open and when the problem starts occurring, look for any unusual process whose CPU usage has gone up. You may also want to look at the Disk Activity tab when Pro Tools is not playing to see if there is any unexplained disk activity (read/write).

Another thing to try once the problem starts occurring would be to shrink the video window so it does not fill the entire screen. You are dragging the video window (Command+9) to a display and then sizing it to fill the display, correct?

[Tweakhead]

Try assigning only 8 processors to Pro Tools.