We just overhauled our mix theatre to accommodate a mix of an IMAX film. We are very happy with the performance of the system but have noticed an anomaly of the video engine. It seems to have to do with the HD h264 decoding of certain shots within the film. The picture plays through well except for when it reaches a few arial and time-lapse shots with a lot of colour information and fast motion within the frame. The audio plays through rock solid at these sections with no drop outs, no evidence of raised VST and no disk buffer peaks. The session is quite large with a track count hovering around 475 tracks, not all playing simultaneously. It was requested that we keep the track count up. In quicktime I am able to play the file back smoothly (hit or miss). In nuendo without audio the file plays back smoothly as well. We are using the newest video engine that is up on the FTP.
We are wary of updating to 5.5 as this is a fairly critical period of the post process. We are looking at either bringing in another system for playback via system link or moving to another system. I have a sample of the shot which seems to have a jittery nature to it. Has anyone experienced anything similar to this with a problem shot or two within a quicktime? Thanks
I can’t help believe there are still issues to be resolved with Nuendo’s (and Cubase 6) video engine.
As you did, I installed the latest version from the download and found it to be much better than the prior one. However I never use H264 as the Video CODEC. IMO the interframe compression it uses (which literally breaks down the frame structure, which makes me nervous right there) eats resources on decoding. I think Nuendo sparingly allocates resources for video playback prioritizing audio. So I use Apple ProRes 422 (proxy) ( I’m Mac Based … though you can get ProRes decoders for PC ) which has been very successful for us. However I do know that performance seems to vary on different hardware … at least on the Mac. My Laptop breezes through with great video playback, whereas a much more powerful MacPro tower experiences video stutters!
Additionally I recently updated Nuendo 5/Cubase 6 to the very latest versions … and experienced “VideoEngine” crashes on launch, resulting in a total app crash (on all our hardware, not just one configuration). I rolled back to Nuendo 5.1.1 and Cubase 6.0 and it’s OK again. I don’t know if these versions have a newer engine causing the problem … or if it’s a wider problem ( I did read a PC user here reporting videoengine.exe crashes with 5.5 too ).
The issue has been reported to Steinberg, Germany and they are looking into it. I know this for a fact.
I’m afraid the answer to you question is to try the update and see … be prepared to roll back though.
We are still on v5.1 and yes, I can confirm that Nuendo plays back HD H.264 files pretty badly. One stereo audio track, no thumbnails, cpu at a ridiculously low usage; while QT has no issues, v5.1 skips frames, smears, and generally looks bad.
We’ll see what happens when we move to v5.5.
Hugh