Hi Terry

I presume you got my reply to your message?

As far as the little gaps (which I presume are sub 1 frame?) go - did you "Create (new) frametable" at any stage or have the "Automatically create frame table on import selected" because I have experienced 1/2 frame gaps appear in my 50P footage after this operation. Magix's advice (so far) on the frametable is only use it at the start of a project and then only if it does not create subsequent problems.

As far as I understand about matching frame rates to footage - MEP should be able to convert to whatever you want on export but you are more likely to get jerky movement in your export if you mix them. Which sparks a faint recollection - when looking at that problem that Wiebe Vandermeer had with his Ixus footage - I think I discovered that the Canon spec for the movie footage framerate actually said something like 24/25fps so maybe the Zoombrowser software is recognising a flag in some metadata and converting the frame rate if you are PAL 25fps.....dunno, all guess work.....

If you choose "Do Not Adjust" I would suggest choosing an another NTSC frame rate such as 24 or 30fps but again trial and error. I would always use "Adjust" FWIW.

Cheers

Hi Peter,

Yes, thanks for the PM, saw it late last night, very helpful.

I'm working on all this again today and will probably be back.

One key point I should have made was that this scrambling effect, with MEP putting stuff on lower tracks as if it can't find room on tracks 1 and 2, only happens when I drag the objects into Scene overview. (I've recently switched to that method, rather than dragging directly to the timeline, as it's sometimes easier to do some prior re-arranging that way.) And even this isn't consistent. Somehow depends on the Adjust/Don't Adjust choice and perhaps on the actual fps! Or maybe it's a performance issue, nothing to do with MEP...

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Hi Terry

Slightly OT - I am curious as to why you would want to drag 166 objects (3Gb+) and a mix of images and stills to the timeline in one go?  

I only add up to 10 to 15 objects max at a time to the timeline, sort out the cuts, effects etc and set the initial transitions.  

I do not use everything that I shoot and often I will change the order of some sequences, where appropriate, to fit in with the 'story' of the movie.

John

Hi John,

Good question! I suppose the reasons are:

1. Habit, I've always done it that way, although 3 GB is by far the largest so far. (A consequence of my camera's 1920x1080 Movie clips and the fact I went a bit OTT sightseeing in Florence!)

2. I've always thought it made sense to get them all in so that I can get a good idea of duration, content, etc.

3. I often use collages on the JPGs and having them all accessible at once seems more efficient.

But if this was a factor in causing the playback problem, then I'd switch at once your bit-at-a-time approach.

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Turning to the jerky playback issue, if you get time maybe you could try my sample files at

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4019461/CanonIxus220HS-Example.MOV

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4019461/CanonIxus220HS-MOV-2.MOV

In MX this is what I see:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4019461/MEP-MX-Jerky.mp4

That second, larger clip show the extreme jerkiness or stuttering. I have no idea why the first, shorter clip is so much better.

But two greater puzzles are:

1.It was the jerky playback of MEP17 that prompted this thtead, Yet that is now playing pretty smoothly.

2. In MX, if I switch from my usual Hardware acceleratiuon mode to Defauly (Overlay) mode - playback becoems smooth!

Peter and I are discussing this by PM, and I'm talking to Ralf about it as well.

I'm putting the 'scrambling' issue aside, at least for now. Mainly because I'm having trouble reproducing it!

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EDIT:

I despair of this forum! I added a follow-up edit afew hours ago, and it was reported as sent successfully, but it's vanished. Here's roughly what it said. I'll leave the above as it stands, to make the sequence of events clear:

Another surprise development.

I ran the test again in MX shortly after that last post, with the mode back at HW Acceleration - and playback is smooth! I've closed and restarted MEP MX, and playback remains smooth. I'm still set to Half Resolution, and Output & File Cache as before. Same apps and services loaded.

The only thing I can think of to cause these erratic results is that there is some background processing occurring, presumably unrelated to MEP, which seriously affects performance. But that's hard to believe. Each of my tests was repeated up to a dozen times. Often I went into XP Task Mgr to check that nothing untoward was happening in the CPU column. If it happens again I'll check that even more rigorously.

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Hi Terry

.... The only thing I can think of to cause these erratic results is that there is some background processing occurring, presumably unrelated to MEP, which seriously affects performance. But that's hard to believe.....

I once commented a long time ago (last year I think) that if your system tray is still full of all those icons of programs running in the background as shown in the image you posted at the time, then I can very well believe that your systems performance is at times very erratic.

As you can see from this shot of my system tray (Windows 7)  I have very little running in the background - the Disc icon by the way is MagicIso virtual CD/DVD manager a very useful little tool. 

Cheers

John

Hi Terry

.... The only thing I can think of to cause these erratic results is that there is some background processing occurring, presumably unrelated to MEP, which seriously affects performance. But that's hard to believe.....

I once commented a long time ago (last year I think) that if your system tray is still full of all those icons of programs running in the background as shown in the image you posted at the time, then I can very well believe that your systems performance is at times very erratic.

As you can see from this shot of my system tray (Windows 7)  I have very little running in the background - the Disc icon by the way is MagicIso virtual CD/DVD manager a very useful little tool. 

Cheers

John

Hi John,

Very few of those admittedly numerous tray icons of mine are actually consuming any significant resource. And I'd be quite handicapped in my DVD-making without easy occasional access to most of them.

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Just tried that zip in both 17 and MX and both play very smoothly with 10 - 20% CPU usage even with colour correction and at full resolution. Crossfade very smooth and 3D page peel smooth with 17 and a little sticky with MX. This is with one clip and program and system is using  around 2 gig of memory and 2.6GB of page file so I could well see some problems with a 100 or so clips on the time line.

I let MEP adjust to your import and it set the Movie settings to NTSC 1920x1080 24p 23.976fps which is correct as far as I can see. As I said earlier MEP should be able to deal with multiple formats and spit out whatever you want but there is always potential for slightly uneven playback on export when you try to add or drop frames to match a target output (regardless of Audio sync).

It might be the stills that are having an influence on preview too, so try unchecking and checking some of those things in program settings > Playback > Change size of image material in high quality  and Video/Audio > reduce Bitmap resolution for improved playback.

Talking of things in the system tray I seem to remember there were a lot of problems with MEP wayback that were put down to those drag to disc setups, especially Roxio. 

Hi Peter,

Just tried that zip in both 17 and MX and both play very smoothly with 10 - 20% CPU usage even with colour correction and at full resolution. Crossfade very smooth and 3D page peel smooth with 17 and a little sticky with MX. This is with one clip and program and system is using  around 2 gig of memory and 2.6GB of page file so I could well see some problems with a 100 or so clips on the time line.

Many thanks for testing it. That pretty well proves that it's not an MEP17 problem then. The real difficulty is that 'it' isn't consistent! In what seem to be similar situations (same clips loaded, same settings, same tray icons, same phase of the moon, etc), sometimes  a clip plays smoothly and sometimes jerkily, as in that video example I posted. And I've found that's the case for several different file types in both MOV and AVI containers, not just these MOV/QT files.

I let MEP adjust to your import and it set the Movie settings to NTSC 1920x1080 24p 23.976fps which is correct as far as I can see.

How did you determine those adjusted settings? I imported as shown here:

I chose Adjust, and then after the import I typed 'E' to get this:

There's no mention of NTSC or PAL, just the resolution and frame rate.

As I said earlier MEP should be able to deal with multiple formats

You mean on import? How does that work in practice? After the above, suppose I next want to import a 25 fps AVI/FRAPS from Google Earth, with some arbitary resolution, never exactly 1920 x 1080. MEP will offer to adjust again. But if I do so, that would change the movie to 25 fps instead of 23.976. If I don't adjust, based on the MOV clips being in the majority, then the AVI will be wrong. I guess I just don't grasp the fundamental principles underlying all this.

and spit out whatever you want but there is always potential for slightly uneven playback on export when you try to add or drop frames to match a target output (regardless of Audio sync).

Could you elaborate on that point again please, maybe using my example above.?

It might be the stills that are having an influence on preview too, so try unchecking and checking some of those things in program settings > Playback > Change size of image material in high quality  and Video/Audio > reduce Bitmap resolution for improved playback.

Thanks, I'll experiment with those.

Talking of things in the system tray I seem to remember there were a lot of problems with MEP wayback that were put down to those drag to disc setups, especially Roxio. 

Once I get a better understanding of the frame rate implications, I'll use msconfig and load the absolute minimum apart from MEP to see if that makes any difference. Mind you, as I mentioned earlier, these tools/utilities/services are only running because I need them! I don't know how much of a day I'd get through in that sort of raw environment!

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK