Jerky video playback

[peter5992]

Good afternoon everyone:

The video playback in one of my sessions is jerky (as if every other frame is skipped). The session frame rate is set to that of the video (23.98) so that can't be it.

I am on windows 7 64 bit professional, with a quadcore CPU, 8 GB of RAM. PT runs from the root disk.

When looking at the performance monitors, upon playback the CPU meter shoots up from a little above zero to around 50% with fluctuations.

The video is an H.264 Quicktime movie. I moved the video to a different hard drive and had it played from there, but that doesn't make any difference.

Could it be the H.264 compression that consumes too much CPU power?

If that is the case, would you recommend a different compression format? Can't recall having this issue before but I am not certain.

Thanks!

[Meads]

h264 is very cpu-hungry. If the data rate is high it's likely, that your machine gets a bit icky.
Try another codec like photo JPEG or ProRes. This will result in a bigger file size but therefor in less cpu usage. Huge difference, that is.

[abes]

I've been using a Prores video running from an external FW800 drive.
The video was 100gb but I've never had any stutters or frame rate issues.

[peter5992]

Many thanks for the replies -- I converted the movie to Photo - JPEG (nearly ten times the size of the original), and now playback is smooth.

Thanks!