optimising multi movie playback
Hello,
I need to play 3 movies - to 3 monitors (HD size) - in sync and am trying many compression variations so they will all play smoothly in the highest possible quality. So far not too successful as they tend to start looking unite low res.
The computer that will be playing them is a Mac Pro, one 2.8 GHZ quad core Xeon processor and 3 GB RAM. There are 2 graphics cards (i.e. one extra) so as to be able to connect the monitors.
I don't have the machine here so can't test on it but wonder - will the graphics cards help in any way (Radeon HD5770) and / or is there a codec that will suit them ? And will upping the RAM help ?
Any strategies or suggestions most welcome !
Thanks,
Jem
Avoid things like H264 and anything with heavy compression as it takes processing power to decompress. I always use photojpeg codec which gives you bigger files, but they are easier to decode. Heard that prores can be good too for this sort of thing.
Its a heavy job doing 3 HD movies, multiple graphics cards with good VRAM will help I think, but there are some tricks to make sure jitter allocates resources to the right one, I think you have to make sure the window is on the right monitor before you start rendering. Check out Vades optimisation tips too: http://abstrakt.vade.info/?p=147
There is a whole other can of worms with jit.qt.movie playing smoothly, search the forum...
Thanks Luke,
A heavy job indeed. What you say is very helpful. I've read the QuickTime confidential in the documentation too, and will look at Vade's tips and search more.
Jem
Just PM'd you.