Delay in playing a slide

[Gypsey]

I have created an AV of 66 slides. One of the slides with a duration of 48 sec contains 45 animations.

As a result when I play the AV there is a delay in starting the first animation on the slide in question,it takes about 10 secs to 'load'the slide and then after skipping the first two animations of about 2 sec it plays perfectly. Apart from this delay the whole AV plays OK

Has anyone got any suggestions as regards cause and solution please

Arthur

[davegee]

Resolution of Image(s) in the 48 second slide?

Resolution and AR of project?

Is there a music file attached to this slide?

DG

[Lin Evans]

Hi Arthur,

It sounds very much like a system resources issue. My first assumption would be that you have exceeded the capacity of your video card. If you would like substantiation and independent confirmation, please post a link to the executable file and some of us with high-end video cards can test it and see if we experience the same delay.

Best regards,

Lin

[Gypsey]

In response to both DG and Lin

The resolution of the images is 1920x1080

There is a music file attached and a series of voice over clips

What does AR stand for

I am endeavouring to attach the exe file by adding it below, but am not sure whether it is actually included as it does not appear on the preview.

I have extracted a section of the AV including the problem slide 4.

The play of the Ace of diamonds should start immediately slide 4 starts.

I thought that the problem might be computer related rather than PTE

Maybe an answer would be to split the offending file into two

Arthur

[Gypsey]

I notice that the attachment does not appear, what should I be doing to achieve the desired result

Arthur

[Lin Evans]

Hi Arthur,

First, open PTE and use the "File" "Create Backup in Zip" to zip all the components into a single zipped archive. You can rename the zipped archive to do away with all the date information and make the file name easier to deal with. Keep the file extension .zip ....

Next go to a file upload and sharing facility such as MediaFire:

http://www.mediafire.com/

Then upload your zipped file to media fire and post a link on the forum here.

Best regards,

Lin

I notice that the attachment does not appear, what should I be doing to achieve the desired result

Arthur

[Jean-Cyprien]

Hi Arthur,

"45 animations" means nothing, it depends of the complexity of the animation, number of files to be loaded, Parents/childs, 3D parameters used or not...

PTE reads all the files (and - I think - makes calculations), for 2 views in advance. If your actual "bad" view takes 10s to be loaded (a lot of files to be loaded ?), try to increase the duration of the previous view (and the previous view of this one, if needed) at least with 10 s. I think you'll see a difference.

( Also if a picture file is too big, (quality too hight, more than 1920x1200...) PTE takes a little time to load it - a fraction of second, not so much as you observe !! )

But Lin is probably right. Your video card is perhaps not powerful enough ?!

Regards

Jean-Cyprien

[Gypsey]

Thanks for the suggestions. I shall pursue them tomorrow.

Regards

Arthur

[nobeefstu]

Arthur,

In addition to the possible causes listed in above posts ... a delay can be promoted by over use of masking and transparency in images. Especially limit or avoid multiple full slide masking by triming the masks to only whats actually needed. If your animated images have large areas of transparency ... trim them down also.

*Use of masks and transparent images requires more demand of your video card.

[Gypsey]

Thanks for all the comments

The problem has been resolved by adopting the suggestion from Jean-Cyprien. Extending the previous image by 10 sec allowed the offending slide to start correctly. This has caused a problem with the length of the background music track and all the subsequent voice over clips, but I am sure that I can handle that.

I would still be interested to find out whether the video card was the cause of the problem, so I have provided a link to a section of 4 slides that I extracted entitled the Power of Shape problem section. The problem lay with the delayed start of slide 4.

I should be grateful If someone could run this with their more powerful video card and let me know whether it works properly.

My video card is GeForce 8600 GT

Arthur

http://www.mediafire...a6gc030gyvirrem

[Lin Evans]

Hi Arthur,

It ran fine with my 8800 GT so I think we can assume that the issue is that your 8600 GT is just a bit dated.

Best regards,

Lin

[Guest Yachtsman1]

Tried it with my Ge force GT220, I am running PTE version 6.04 so I couldn't make it run full screen, only in the mini player, where it ran oK

Yachtsman1

[cead]

Arthur,

Your 'The Power of Shape'-project runs perfectly on the ATI Radeon HD 3870 (PTE 7.0.4).

Kind regards,

Frans

[fh1805]

Arthur,

It ran fine on my nVidia GeForce 210 which is rated lower than my old 8600GS but newer technology and has 1GB memory compared to the old 8600's 256MB. However, I noticed that you have a lot of really "heavy" images: there's a lot of 1920x1080 PNG files. I took my system a noticeable amount of time to build up the slide image when I took any of your slides into the O&A window. It also took a long time to build the temporary EXE file when I ran a Preview of it. I think you need to try and reduce the size of those PNGs. All you really need is the card area; you do not need all the empty space around the card.

regards,

Peter

[Gypsey]

Thanks to everyone

I think that we can consider that the question has been answered.

Interesting suggestion Peter for future use. To change everything at this stage would be rather time consuming.

Arthur

[Jean-Cyprien]

Hi Arthur,

I have a GeForce 560Ti with 1 GB of Memory Size. I think it's not a bad card. Nevertheless I have 8 seconds without animation.

With my new powerful ASUS G74S 91171V (3D) and GeForce 560M with 3 Go of memory size, not a bad card too I think, there is still 3 seconds without animation.

So, I think it's not only a problem of video card, but certainly a problem with the downloading speed of your files.

In my mind, it was not possible to download more than 2 Mo par second. Perhaps it's a little more today, I don't know, but here there is too much to do.

When all the files are downloaded, there is no more such problem. Try the following thing : when you are seeing the slide #4 after 10 s, and then, the animation is now running (or seeing the following views), press the left arrow to go back to the previous view #3, and you'll see that the animation starts immediatly with the beginning of the view #4. Because all the files are still in the memory.

Regards

Jean-Cyprien

[xahu34]

Regarding the performance of version 7, it is my experience that it is not as good as the one of version 6. In version 6 we had the choice for images: mipmapping or not, and I had situations with a panning panorama in which avoiding mipmapping led to better animations. In version 7, mipmapping is used always. So, I can produce situations on my machine where version 6 produces a visually better performance.

Regards,

Xaver

[Lin Evans]

Hi Jean,

I think there is almost a three second delay normal. The first two slides have .5 second duration and the third is 1.3 seconds so 2.3 seconds before anything in the way of animation starts.

I think it's a combination of load time and video card capacity for Arthur. I also have a system with the 8600 GT card which I will try it on. The main issue appears to be loading size of files rather than the animation itself, but with the size of the PNG files, I think the 8600 card is a bit overwhelmed.

Both the 560Ti and 560M are excellent graphics cards and much better than my 8800GT. Subtracting the 2.3 seconds of the first three slides from the total time before animation on my 8800GT system, I have a five second delay before animation. So I would say your system with the 560M is probably about as good as it will get. I think I would set the first two slides to a longer display time, perhaps of three seconds each, then the third to five seconds. When I do this, the animation starts immediately at 11 seconds, similar to your first suggestion. Of course the solution for now may be to greatly reduce the size of the PNG files for the cards.

Best regards,

Lin

[Jean-Cyprien]

Hi Lin, and Xaver

I agree with you.

I've suggested a duration' increase of 10s because Arthur had said there was 10s s before the animation starts. This 10s could be distributed between different previous views as you say.

Concerning the png files, I think that after downloading them, PTE has to "translate" them into his own language and so it needs power and time. If there is a lot of transparencies, PTE has to do with them.

About the performance of the latest versions, the #6 and not only the #7... I think this is the price to pay to have 3D possibilities (and what nice possibilities they are, I think) and the video introduction (and the sounds). What we can't cure (but know) must be endured, that is we have to modify our first ideas in such ways that PTE default will not be seen. I'm sure a lot of defaults could be treated by Igor's team if they will take the time to do this, and so I hope the future versions will be better.

Best regards,

Jean-Cyprien

[Gypsey]

The bottom line is that lengthening the preceding slide by 10 sec has solved the problem. I have added a relevant voice over clip which neatly fills up that 10 sec and I think improves the overall AV.

Jean - I had noticed that once the files had ben downloaded that going back and running again the problem disappeared, but creating an exe file at that stage doesn't retain that status.

The one point that has been made by Peter and others is the size of the PNG files.

As only the card is included on a transparent background, each file is quite small, varying from 60Kb to 500Kb for a picture card so I don't see how this can be decreased.

Am I missing something about creating PNG files.

Arthur

[Lin Evans]

Hi Arthur,

The transparent background is, for the purposes of your pc, just as if it were a multi-layer file full of data. The fact that it is a transparent layer with only a small image on it doesn't reduce its memory footprint.

Try this, take one of your png files and open it in Irfanview and look at the memory footprint. Now crop it so that there is only the card and all excess transparency is removed, save it and repeat using Irfanview or other viewer which shows the memory footprint. You will see a significant difference. Even though the "storage" size may be small because of compression, when the file is loaded into memory it expands to its full 8 or 16 bit footprint.

Here's an example:

Notice that the "disc size" (the size of the file in storage) is less than 8 k, but the "memory size" is 2.5 megabytes. What may "seem" like a relatively tiny file, may in fact be quite large. Compressed files expand in memory to their full eight bit uncompressed footprint.

Best regards,

Lin

Below is a transparency (the black part) with a relatively small playing card size grey patch......

[Barry Beckham]

Arthur

I think the guys here have given you the answer, but a long shot may be to update your graphics card drivers. They usually become out of date, even before you get your PC home, so if you have never updated them, it odds on there will be improved drivers available. There is no guarrantee that this will fix your problem, but at nil cost its worth a try. Over the years it has fixed one or two problems I have experienced.

I usually do this through System > Device manager > update driver

[Tony Falla]

I have been having a similar problem to Arthur but thought it was something to do with transferring the development to an iMac running PTE under WMWare Fusion. As with Arthur I have a large number of O&A's on most slides mainly using some fairly large PNG files, this was being developed fine on my PC with 12GB memory, i7 processor and 1GB graphics card. My iMac has 16GB memory, i7 processor and 2GB graphics card, but when developing I have problems playing the sequence using the timeline, I place the blue arrow at the position I want to test the sequence and press play, the audio plays fine but the sequence stutters along. By experiment I have found that if I keep stopping and restarting the sequence will eventually play without stuttering. I have discovered that Fusion only allows me to use part of the iMac's capacity, 8GB of memory and 256K of graphic card memory so I am actually using less than on the PC.

The thing that I have noticed is that I do not get this problem if I use either of the Preview buttons. I think I can understand this as my logic says this is because Preview, I presume, creates a temporary exe file which is then run, whereas under timeline it must do some kind of build up as it runs along and because it has so much work to do that is what causes the stutter. Is this logic correct? Although I don't understand why it should eventually run without stuttering, I think that it is something to do with loading changes I have made. I have noticed, and this applied on the PC, it takes quite a time when first opening up for all slides to be loaded.

This sequence is an experiment and through this discussion I have learnt a lot but as it is nearly finished I will not attempt any major changes at the moment

Tony

[fh1805]

The thing that I have noticed is that I do not get this problem if I use either of the Preview buttons. I think I can understand this as my logic says this is because Preview, I presume, creates a temporary exe file which is then run, whereas under timeline it must do some kind of build up as it runs along and because it has so much work to do that is what causes the stutter. Is this logic correct?

Tony,

Your logic is correct: Preview and Preview from Selected Slide buttons both trigger the creation of a temporary EXE file. Both the mini-player and the playback in the O&A window "build as they go".

Peter

[nobeefstu]

Arthur,

Upon testing your 4 Slide The_Power_of_Shape_Problem_section.zip project you can vastly reduce your memory peak useage foot print by a considerable amount.

Test 1 - Orig PNG Images with excess transparency data

Playback of EXE with Full PNG images resulted in a 15MB/387MB memory use

Test 2 - Auto Crop PNG Images to remove excess transparency data

Playback of EXE with Auto Crop PNG images resulted in a 15MB/109MB memory use

*Trimming out your Orig PNG Images transparency data resulted in a memory peak savings of 278MB