The best practice "guide" to have a smooth and stable machine

General
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1

Hi,
I am quite new to caspar, I allways wanna try it out but never have the time to do it, so this is the perfect moment to do it :smiley:

I’ve done my first experiments with flash dynamic template, with PNG sequences, text and dynamic images, but I am experiencing issue with the smoothness of the system, with the flash templetas in particular.

I am running the 2.0.7 in two different hardware setup, because I’m making some test with a colleague, In one of them I’ve tried also the 2.2.0. In both configuration I have the same issue.

I have a heavy flash template (but this happens also with other template in a lighter way) with a lower third, animated frame by frame. The template wheight 66MB.

This is the situation when i put it in play

image
image1035×1078 165 KB

After one ore two looping cycles it go stable and the animation is smooth.

image
image1024×1070 91.8 KB

But also if I put a sample video (like the CG1080i50) i have some lag with ffmpeg too.

image
image1030×1076 140 KB

The things I’ve tried:

  • Update flash
  • Remove flash and use only the 11.8 (linked in caspar website)
  • Update net framework
  • Update windows
  • Update video driver

After that i have the situation that you can see in the screenshot, and it is far better than the previous state of thing. Before system/software update the graphics never went smooth.

Note: Here I have a Xeon 12C 1.2Ghz, 32GB Ram, two Nvidia GTX 870 and I’m running caspar and template from a SSD
In the other machine I have an intel i9, 32GB Ram, nvidia quadro card, two blackmagic Decklink 4k and running caspar from ssd.

Have you any suggestion for me? :slight_smile:

2

I can see none of them.

3

One is in the text flow, the other two is a link. I’ve checked in the smartphone and everithing seems fine :open_mouth:

I add also a video reference: 2020-04-01 19-23-57-1.mp4 - Google Drive

4

The ones that are links do not work, probably only if you have a login. I can upload many pictures to the forum, so I don’t understand.

No matter, The problem with PNG sequences in Flash is, that you cannot use full screen PNG’s. That uses too much performance. What I can see from your video is, that you have only a lower third, so most of the PNG is transparency. What you can try is, only use the area that has graphics contens. That reduces the frame to, for instance, 500x100 pixels, instead 1920x1080. You put the sequence into a MovieClip instead of the stage, put the MovieClip on the position were it needs to be and play it using action script. You template will run smooth and will be much smaller in size.

5

(Side note: I’ve edited the original post to include the externally uploaded images)

1 Like
6

Wow! I am an idiot!
This was an impressive change in the performance!! Thanks a lot didkunz!

7

No, you are not. You got it without asking back and what I have written was not meant for beginners, because I was too lazy to made it more verbose. So you sure are a guy who knows a few things :smile:

1 Like
8

Also, turn off all power management in your BIOS / adjust windows for maximum performance.

1 Like
9

Thanks to all of you! I am finding this software wonderful!

To Recap what you told me and what I discovered (can be useful for anyone)

If you want to play a video with alpha I look better perfomarmance with a .mov - Animation then the prores 444
If you have complex PNG Animation is better to make the PNG images as little as you can, without making a full resolution canvas with alpha all around (it’s better for flash)
BIOS: Turn off Power Managment
Windows: Update NET Framework, leave flash player at version 11.8 (you can download from caspar website), set “best performance” in windows “Advanced System Setting”/“Performace”
Use the casparCG frontend plus the windows task manager to find where is the problem.

10

Also I have used some really heavy png sequences where performance is poor the first run but successful for all subsequent runs. So I run the whole sequence through once off air and then it works great.

11

Anyone tried to set in the config the flash buffer to a high, fixed number like 8 or 10 frames? This has helped with full screen pngs.
Still every producer loaded will slow down the server for many frames but it becomes stable after a second