Intermittently long cook for Movie File In TOP with JPEGs?

Hi all,

I feel like I’m missing something obvious that I’m doing wrong, and I’d love to have a second set of eyes on these parameters.

I have a project that’s loading JPEG images cached locally from a curated social media source – images on a SMB file share, metadata in a Postgres database. Occasionally when I feed a new image to the Movie File In Top, it’ll take a long time to cook when it loads the image (up to 400ms), and it blocks the whole project, despite the tuning timeouts set really low. There’s nothing exotic in the JPEG – file sizes are reasonable, resolution is < 2000px, encoding isn’t anything weird. And nothing seemingly different from JPEGs that are loading normally. I don’t think it’s a network issue – same thing is happening if I have it load the JPEGs from local storage.

I also tried using an Execute to watching all the moviefileinTOPs, triggering preload when it gives them a new filename, and waiting for .isfullypreread==True before it sets .play==True.

From the performance monitor:

TOP parameters:
Screen Shot 2016-08-01 at 11.44.47 AM.png
Screen Shot 2016-08-01 at 11.44.54 AM.png
Screen Shot 2016-08-01 at 11.45.02 AM.png
Screen Shot 2016-08-01 at 11.45.12 AM.png

Any ideas? What am I missing?

Try settings pre-read to 1 frame and then setting your timeouts to 0 and see if that helps.

Just tried it – still same problem.

It seems weird that the timeout parameter doesn’t have any effect on the problem, right? That’s what confuses me the most about it.

You should have the pre-read higher, put it back to 3 (if you are just doing single frames it won’t waste memory). Having it at 0 is cleaning up your memory after every load, causing it to be slower for the next load.
The other issue is if your resolutions change, that will cause a GPU memory allocation which can be quite slow. Since your timeouts are low this is likely the issue rather than slowness reading the file itself.

I was having the same issue with 16bit exr frames until I upped the preread to 30
(else I can’t play two sequences at the same time)

while on the subject here’s a question I asked on the slack channel:

uncompressed 16bits tifs are loading as 8bit / can’t assign pixel format (grayed out), 32bit tif aren’t loading at all. (tifs comes from after effects)

what would be the best way to import a 16 bit animation?