imported movie sluggish

[fxbuilder]

I'm using a miro dc 30 card and QT 4.0. (9600, 200mz, 8.6) When I scrub everything lags behind and is really slow. Its hard to pinpoint an exact location for fx. Anyone know how to fix this problem?

[coaster]

i have found this same slugishness with 8600/300 pt432 qt4.01 os8.6

i have found reducing the track size for the video clip to help dramatically. in fact, if you can deal with no representation of the video in the edit window you can simply change the track to represent blocks instead of frames. this seems to have no lag time in my setup. however, this is not very convenient for spotting effects which is what you seem to want to do.
perhaps you could set your edit window monitor to 256 colors?
sorry if you've tried all this before.
i have to go back and forth between premeire 5.1c and pt and i know it's a pain.

[fxbuilder]

Thanks for the ideas. I haven't tried changing the colors to a smaller amount yet. I have, however, made the tracks blocks and also hidden the track all together. If I take the movie offline pt goes back to normal. I I have the movie online then the scrub function becomes a pig again. Any more Ideas? I need this to work. Thanks

[Arno Peeters]

I use a DC20 which was not compatible with any QT-version over 2.5... Maybe you're running into the same kind of problem.

Furthermore: it's pretty important to have the proper datarates and sizes: I live in PAL country, so I don't know any sizes for NTSC, but I use 340 x 288 @ 700 kb/sec. which works fine. Maybe this helps.

[sounddefects]

I have been dealing with this exact same problem since I got my mix+ system and 4.31 11 weeks ago (BTW, where the hell is my free mixpack- 4 to 6 weeks my ass! Does it really take 11 weeks to test a ******n installer?!). Anyway, my old nubus videovision studio card worked flawlessly, but my DC30+, and also Fuse card, are both EXTREMELY sluggish while scrubbing with the movie engaged. Take the movie offline and scrubbing is perfect. The only fix (which does me absolutely no good) is if you disable "insertion follows scrub" in the preferences, scrubbing is then fine with picture. The problem of course is that you are usually scrubbing with the intention of finding a specific insertion point!! I have been over this with other users with almost identical systems. Some have this same problem and most don't. I can't seem to track it down to any particular version of quicktime, miro extensions, DAE versions, Mac types, etc. It also has nothing to do with movie priority level, speed of the drives, movie quality, etc.
Also, reducing the track size for the video clip, changing the track to represent blocks instead of frames, and setting the monitor to 256 colors has no effect at all on this particular problem.
If anyone knows the answer to this one PLEASE let us know.

[This message has been edited by sounddefects (edited 12-18-99).]

[fxbuilder]

You've hit it on the head! Described it all perfectly. DIGI HELP PLEASE!!!!!!!

[Boom Chic]

If you are watching on an external monitor out of your DC30, hide the video track, and drag the movie window to the bottom of your screen til just the menubar and one line of pixels is showing on your movie window. I think you have to have thousands of colors, or the video won't play on your computer monitor. Also, digitise at "limit data rate to 500" or less to get better performance. I do 320 x 240 and this works fine for me. When you scrub audio, the video will follow, or should follow.
Hope this helps.

Karen Basset
Boom Chic Studios

[coaster]

ah ha! i just dumped in 55 minutes of videotape in my machine. i taped this rock(?) band at a club on video and audio. thought i would edit it for lenght in pt 4.3.2 and then put it on a new video tape, in stereo.
HA!
you guys are right, the scrub is obnoxiuos. it doesnt seem to go very far(more than a few seconds) but my main gripe is in the video playback. in pt 4.3.2 the video stutters and glitches. premeire 5.1c w qt4.0x will play back 640*480 at 15 fps on my second monitor with slight compression. however the audio suffers severly. i compressed this video down to 320*240 at 15fps at cinepak compression. my data rate dropped from almost a meg a second to 223.1k per second yet pt would not play back consistently. I burned the video onto a cd to free up my hd and no difference. i ended up playing it in premiere with the mac hardware to videotape. why must i have video OR audio and not BOTH?

[sounddefects]

Boom Chic wrote:
<<If you are watching on an external monitor out of your DC30, hide the video track, and drag the movie window...etc...
...the video will follow, or should follow.>>

Thanks for taking the time to post that but the fact is, luckily for you, you are one of the many who are just not experiencing this problem. I have done all that you have said, including digitizing my movies between 450 and 500 (always have) but, as I posted above, the picture follows along when you scrub, but it is so sluggish as to be unusable. The audio usually starts off like you're starting a record player from a standstill and then will play too fast or usually just too slow. Just no control. Disengage the movie and scrubbing is perfect. One other factor I did realize is that when I play off the mac only, scrubbing to picture is MUCH better. This wouldn't be that bad of a fix except for another problem, which may be another clue here. When I try to use the miro control strip to switch back and forth between mac and external video it doesn't work. I have to switch it, and then re-import the movie in order to make the switch happen. When I had my fuse card it didn't do thus, the control strip worked instantly. Is anyone else experiencing this??

[AMG]

This is a problem that I have experienced with the Miro and now the Fuse card. I don't believe it is a problem with the drivers of either product, but rather an issue within Protools. Any permutation of color settings, movie priority, frame rates, etc. don't offer any improvement. Early PT4 and QT3 combinations were much better. Perhaps QT has fallen out of favor at Digidesign.