I would hazard a guess that the "heaviness" of the sequence was due to all
of those Graphics effects each holding a large image.
My methodology for over-sized images is either to capture them (with the
correct import settings of course) or to link to them and then DVE them to
size. I would never use a Graphics effect as an image holder. Captured
images add no weight to a sequence. Linked images with a static DVE add very
little weight to a sequence. Graphics effects, particularly if they're
holding a large image will definitely add weight.
Regards,
Tone :)
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ds(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-ds(at)Softimage.COM] On Behalf Of
David Rowe
Sent: 08 December 2005 15:09
To: 'DS(at)Softimage.COM'
Subject: RE: what happened to this show? (crashes, failing to render, out of
memory, etc)
Hi Owen
Sorry to hear about your difficulties.
I won't speak to each error you are having individually, but a simple
start would be to break your timeline up into Blocks or Acts. I have
similar issues because all I do is long form documentaries.
My timelines are almost never simple (the current show I am working on has
over 3000 clip effects).
I have never worked with the DNxHD compression and I won't be at all
surprised if this contributed to your problems, but try just shortening your
timelines and once everything is rendered and finalized glue your timelines
together again for the output.
Good luck
David Rowe
Senior Editor
CTV Specialty Television
416-332-4597
-----Original Message-----
From: Owen Williams [mailto:owilliams(at)powderhouse.net]
Sent: Thursday, December 08, 2005 9:24 AM
To: DS List
Subject: what happened to this show? (crashes, failing to render, out
of memory, etc)
We recently onlined a show on the DS that was different for us in two ways:
we used DNxHD for the first time, and it was very graphics-heavy compared to
what we usually do. We had about 10-11 minutes of stills and animation for
the hour-long sequence, which is high for us. We ran into major problems
with the DS crashing, not playing down, and eventually failing to render
properly. We'd like to know how to avoid these problems in the future,
because I had to work a lot of extra agonizing hours trying to get this show
out the door.
Any
hunches or advice would be greatly appreciated.
So here's the setup: We have an hour-long 1080i/DNxHD 220 sequence with a
lot of stills and animations. The effects in our sequence are not
particularly difficult, just basic stills with alphas in up to four of five
layers.
To conform the stills, I opened a graphics effect and imported the stills,
fitting them to the size of the HD frame. Some of the stills were a couple
times the size of the HD frame, but I scaled them to fit.
One short sequence contained 30 or so stills, each a single frame. (I
called this the "seizure clip".)
After we started color correction, we noticed that it was taking a long time
to save the sequence, about 2 or 3 minutes. I did some digging, and
discovered that the sequence had grown to 400 megabytes, whereas the
conformed sequence had started at 4 megs before I started placing stills.
Soon after that we started having playback errors. I could only play back a
few seconds of footage before I got an error message saying that the nitris
had a CRC decoding error, or "the video hardware is having difficulty
reading images" / "waiting time to get image expired." We also got a lot of
out-of-memory errors when trying to work with the effects. Just clicking
locations in the timeline would generate memory errors.
Since the sequence was so huge, I thought that perhaps the problem was that
the stills were being stored in the sequence (which seems daft), and that
they were consuming too much memory. I proceeded to replace stills wherever
I could with quicktime outputs of the effects. For instance, the seizure
clip became a single small quicktime that I dropped in to replace the
graphics effect.
I also deleted all the media from a previous show and defraged with O&O
using the "space" method.
Unfortunately this didn't solve the problems. The sequence was still 400
megs and I was still having problems playing the sequence. At this point it
also started crashing, and sometimes upon recovery it said it had trouble
with some of the effects. It claimed some of the effects were not installed
correctly. At this point I was afraid the sequence was getting corrupt. We
seeked out all the places where effects trees had nodes that said "effect
not installed" and fixed them.
I then tried pasting the entire sequence into a new, blank sequence, and
that reduced the sequence size to 100 megs, which is big but manageable.
It has since grown back to 200 megs, even though we didn't any more stills.
As the online progressed, the playback problems nearly disappeared, but soon
we had a lot of trouble processing frames. Usually the render would hang,
saying "waiting for rendered image...". When I get that message I exit out
of DS and reboot the Nitris hardware, but this time that didn't fix the
problem. A few times it would say "can't write image to disk through node
based graph". I don't know what that means.
Basically it became impossible to render most effects, even simple things
like a software-realtime DVE and color correction.
I figured out that we could get it to render most things if we had our RP
box render them. Using that method we got all but three small sections
rendered. From there we had to rearrange effets or tweak them slightly
before they would render. Again this suggests to me a corrupt sequence, but
why on earth would the RP be able to cope with the problems?
We were able to output the show, but we still can't render effects reliably
unless we send them to the RP, and that takes a long time, even with 220
media.
Here are my questions:
* should the nitris be able to store a large number of high-quality stills
and perform effects on them?
* If so, why did our sequence get so huge, and why did I keep running out of
memory operating on stills?
* did our sequence get corrupt, and is there a way to repair that
corruption?
* why did remote processing work, but not local processing?
* why does remote processing process realtime (green) sections even when I
don't want it to?
* why does the RP reload the entire sequence for every single process
operation, instead of caching the last copy or just copying the relevant
section of timeline?
thanks,
Owen Williams
Online Editor
Powderhouse Productions
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