Large video file playback

Hi there,

I would like to use TouchDesigner to play large video files for dome projection (3K +, 60 fps, 300GB +) running with timecode. The films are rendered in Hap but it gets very laggy and the frame rate drops dramatically as they are playing.

Here are the specs of the PC used for those tests:

Windows 10, 64
Intel(R) Core™ i7 6700K CPU @ 4.00 GHz 32GB RAM
GeForce GTX 1080

Any idea how to play such files without frame drops if possible? Any Movie File In TOP specific configuration? Pre-read or cache work around?

Thank you

Vincent

A 3k 60hz Hap Q video is possibly pushing the limits of a limit SSD drive. Are you using a m.2 drive or a regular drive? How is the Hap Q encoded? If you are using ffmpeg you’ll want to use the -chunks option to use chunked encoding so the decoding is fast.
Also turning on the ‘High Performance Read’ option in the Tune page of the Movie File In TOP may help too.

Yes, it is playing from an SSD 1T.

Also, the films are rendered with ffmpeg 8 chunks in Hap (not HapQ for smaller file).

The machine used was for testing the workflow but we plan to build another one. Do you think TouchDesigner will be able to play a 3K 60fps movie? If so, what kind of hardware would we need?

Ya it definitely can. People have played higher resolution than that before. The hardware seems fine as well. I’d try turning the Pre-Read Frames to 5, and turn on High Performance Read. How are things when you do that?

It’s running smoothly (3K 60fps, 4K 30fps) for few seconds and then it drops to 2 frames per second. Does it have something to do with the cache?

Possibly. Use the Info CHOP to see what the issue is. You want to look for things such as the disk read time and the decode time. Ideally they both need to be staying below 16ms to maintain 60fps

Usually when HAPQ playback stutters it just means your single SSD disk is too slow.
At 3000x3000 x60 fps HAPQ you’ll need around ~540MB/s disk read speed, which can’t be delivered by a single regular SSD drive.

My advice is to switch to a PCI-E M.2 SSD drive as your media drive (run OS on other drive) such as the Samsung 960 Pro. It has 3300 MB/sec readspeed, where a regular SSD drive can do only <500 MB/s.

And indeed also make sure you’ve enabled chunked encoding when creating your HAPQ file.

Thank you very much!

I’ll have a look at it. This one just came out too:

[url]Samsung Introduces 8TB SSD for Data Centers in Next-generation ‘NF1’ Form Factor – Samsung Global Newsroom

Right sorry, I misread and thought you were already using a m.2 SSD. A regular SSD SATA is usually 200-300 MB/s read speed.