Fading background videos

[Carlos]

Hi there!

Let me explain myself the best I can...

I have a project where each speaker has his own video background, covering the whole screen. My approach was to make a hierarchy container with the videos, apply each one to an overlay rectangle, and animate their alpha with a keyframe animation, so in each state there was only one video with 100% alpha and the rest of them 0%.

But I've noticed that this is not the best practice, my performance is heavily affected with this approach, maybe because the videos are still calling for resources even when they are blocked, I don't know...

Could you tell me what's the best way to blend background videos, summing it up?

Thank you in advance!

[Christian Krix Schmidt]

Your approach would work, but you have to deactivate the movies when they are not active/played. Otherwise you will quickly run into performance issues. It's a property of the Movie Advanced Node and yuo need to animate that property in your timeline for each movie. Just to be safe, you should activate the clip at least half a second before you actually fade it in.

[Carlos]

Thank you Christian! That's exactly what I do. Actually, I bind the alpha value to the inactive and blocked parameters so when it's 0, the video is both inactive and blocked.

But even though, I suffer from stuttering when my texts rolls in. It's strange, because it only happens with plain text coming from the outside and getting into its place with just a position keyframing with a damper applied.

I've removed the drop shadow effect, I've changed the typography to the default, and nothing seems to work, there's always a little bit of stuttering that is removed when I remove the Background videos hierarchy container...

Any thoughts?

[Carlos]

I'm thinking that maybe my nVidia could be better configured... I'm running a Quadro 5000.

Should I tweak the parameters on the nVidia control panel or should I let that on the base profile and change the values on the project configuration?

[chriss0212]

hi carlos

are you maybe running in virtual fullscreen?

greetz

christian

[Carlos]

Nope, everything was just fine.

I've deleted a RenderTarget node I used as a "panic button" and now it's all smooth once again.

Anyway, I think there's always some way to tune up the performance. I have quite a decent hardware, but I gotta be extremely careful, because my performance is always on the edge... Any of you guys runs a Ventuz on a nVidia based system? Have any of you changed any parameters on the nVidia control panel?

As always, I'm truly grateful for your help, this forum is actually one of the best Ventuz assets

[Carlos]

I mean... Are this statistics right? How can I improve them?

[Christian Krix Schmidt]

Your performance stats are fine. More than fine actually. You are no where near any performance hit. So it (probably) must be something else. My best guess would be the movie files themselves.

Are the movies set to ASync? And I would detach the Enabled property from the alpha property just for tests sake and have the movie fade in half a second after you enabled it. Also, the video codec and container you use has a HUGE impact on performance. In general from my experience NEVER use quicktime container with h264. Actually, never use quicktime at all if you can. That always has performance problems. Use a MP4 container with h264. That works very well. You can export that directly from After Effects or the Movie Encoder from Adobe.

We work exclusively on nVidia hardware, ranging from shitty low performance GeForce cards to high-end ones, as well as Quadro cards in large synced clusters. There is nothing really in the control panel settings of the nVidia driver that would direclty influence anything. What you should do however - just to be sure - is to reset everything to the default settings. Anisotropic-filtering and Antialiasing mode to "Application-controlled", Antialiasing-Transparency and FXAA also Off if you have those settings. Power Management to Prefer Maximum Performance however and Texture Filtering - Quality to "Quality". That give you the best performance baseline. Anything above that is just to increase the fidelity and quality at the expense of performance.

[Carlos]

Wow. Christian, I'm so grateful!

I think I've sorted it out, I was blocking the node itself, not binding the "Enable" property for the video files, and my performance statistics no longer show a red bar, and everything runs smooooooth.

What does the Async propierty actually does? Could you, please, explain to myself as a graphic designer, and not a computer geek?

THNAK YOU SO MUCH.

[Christian Krix Schmidt]

Great that you found the error. The Async property is easily described. It loads/unloads the movie asynchronously. That means more or less that the loading process is a separate process running independent of the render process. It therefore does not interfere with the renderer. You do not have frame drops when loading the movie anymore. This is an absolute must to enable if you load/unload movies like you do. The downside is that the loading process takes a bit longer then usually. But only by a few frames and that is very much worth it.