Video choppy and unusable

Cubase
1

In Cubase 5 I had Quicktime video option for playback and could work fine. Now in Elements 10.5 I can’t play videos and there’s no QT anymore. Any video format plays horribly choppy and I can’t work. I can’t find a solution in any forum or YT video. I have a GT120 video card (which I need to plug the Apple display and it’s damn miniport thingy) and before anyone tells me it’s a crappy video card, I have been working with it for ages, and could play videos when I first installed Elements. Should I go back to 10.0? Or 5? Or what?
Any way to have QT back?
Changing the Nvidia driver (down) didn’t do anything. Please help.

W10 64bits / i7 / 12G ram /
Nvidia GT120 / 512 - Nvidia driver version 342.01

2

Here is a list of supported video formats in Cubase.
In my personal experience I had a lot of headaches getting video files to play smoothly even though they adhere to the formats listed in the link. The video would play a few frames, then freeze. (If I stopped playback the video would update to the correct frame.)
In the end, I had to get low resolution renders made of the files in order to work with them in Cubase. An annoying and time consuming workaround, but one that works.
I should say this is in Cubase Pro 10.5 and I have not worked with video tracks in Cubase 12.

3

@mlib are you using Apple ProRes? It is smooth and light for playback.

4

Thanks Steve. I get the video files sent to me in a H264 MPEG format, I don’t render or convert them myself.
Nevertheless I’ll keep it in mind and see if I can perform some tests on my own.

5

Thanks guys. I did a test with ProRes, but still it’s choppy. The funny thing is that when you scroll he video, it scrolls smoothly, but when you play it, it’s 1 frame per second. It’s Cubase’s video driver (or system, container etc) for sure. The QuickTime video was perfect. I can play any format on Cubase 5. I don’t know why they took it out. Even if Apple doesn’t support it anymore, screw it, keep the old QT. At least we still have the option. But… I have an old computer, the GT120 etc, so I guess I’m behind. Not rich enough :slight_smile:
I’ll try the low quality version. Thank you.

6

@mlib h.264 requires more processing power than ProRes, so check it out.

Not in modern Cubendo.

I don’t remember what the prob was with QT, but iirc, there was some security issue. Anyway, it’s been deprecated for a long, long time.

1 Like
7

Yes, like me! :slight_smile:
It would be nice to have a decent video player in its place, but I guess it’s my old system that can’t handle modern cubendo now.
Thank you.

8

Same problem here, video playback is choppy and it freezes every few seconds (Cubase Elements 11/12, Windows 10).
My PC is old (2013), but the same video runs perfectly fine in Reaper.

For this particular task I guess I’ll have to use Reaper, ugh…