Hardware speedup for Jitter
After improving speed all I knew how to do in software, I made a couple of purchases to speed up my Jitter playback and recording. They made a significant difference to the capture speed…no surprise, I guess.
For playback, I am random-accessing multiple quicktime video files (1280 X 720). I sped this up with a Expresscard 34 solid-state drive I loaded into my MacBook Pro. For capture, I put a Black Magic Intensity Pro in a separate Windows dual-core Intel computer, added a RAID 0 drive (2 disks). I take the mini-dvi out of the laptop, use a HDMI adaptor and go into the Black Magic card for video, and take the headphone out of the Macbook, go into a mixer and combine the playback audio from the Quicktime files with additional audio added live, and run it into the Black Magic audio in (2 RCA connectors), which records it all to the RAID drive, in sync. I doubled my frame playback rates, and increased the capture rate up to 5 times over software capture. -Robert
For anyone interested, here’s what it looks like.
I couldn’t get the screen jump speed with other approaches.
-Robert
Hello Robert:
thank you for sharing your experiences. Couple weeks ago i managed to render using the intensity pro. My setting was a mcp->HDMI->mac pro capturing with FCP. It really enhanced freedom on the real time performance. We were working with two computers, one running superCollider and sending OSC messages; the second computer was generating the visuals. When the time allows I am planning to do a post explaining some tricks i found on the process.
We are currently working on the project but here is a small example:
http://www.vimeo.com/9805071
Again thank you for the feedback, it was really useful!
Emmanuel
You’re welcome Emmanuel, and I’ll take a look at your project when I get a chance later today.
I’d left out that I’m capturing onto the Intensity Pro using Premiere CS3.
The hardware upgrade took me a couple months to pay for (new computer, BM card, RAID, Expresscard), but it is definitely worth it. Since I’m not playing the videos linearly, but with practically each frame being a jump (and giving a completely different image), it just solved the problems with a quantum leap in capture rates.
Later,
Robert