Anyone else having this issue?

[Lin Evans]

Between 8u and 9 I've noticed a "pulsing" of horizontal movement. Take a single image and set the size to about 25 percent of original so there is plenty of black surrounding the image. Set the custom time to about 10 seconds. Start with the image completele off the screen to the left and set a single keypoint at about the 10 second point and drag the image off the screen on the right. Run the preview and see if the horizontal movement "pulses" or jerks at about 1 second intervals.

It doesn't do this in 8u for me, the movement is very smooth, but it does do this in 9 and 9a.

Note: I've discovered that this problem seems to be limited to my development system which uses an ATI 9800 Radeon Pro AGP graphics card. Something between 8v and 9a has changed because this card has been glass smooth with all movement until now.

Problem is now solved. Igor had me disable my SoundBlaster Audigy sound card to test and with the card disabled through the control panel, system, hardware, device manager, sound-video and game controller, the problem went away. I was fully expecting it to return when I re-enabled the sound card but it did not return and everything works perfectly now with butter smooth pans, zooms and so on - fantastic.

Igor is doing further tests now with log files from my system...

Lin

[Peter S]

Between 8u and 9 I've noticed a "pulsing" of horizontal movement. Take a single image and set the size to about 25 percent of original so there is plenty of black surrounding the image. Set the custom time to about 10 seconds. Start with the image completele off the screen to the left and set a single keypoint at about the 10 second point and drag the image off the screen on the right. Run the preview and see if the horizontal movement "pulses" or jerks at about 1 second intervals.

It doesn't do this in 8u for me, the movement is very smooth, but it does do this in 9 and 9a.

Lin

Lin,

I tried this and got a very slight pulsing - I had to watch hard to see it. I then used a very small object (a round ball) zoomed out to 3.8, placed it over a green backgound and ran a similar trial. The ball showed a very obvious hesitation. I tried moving the ball left to right, right to left and vertically. I got the same hesitation in each case. It seemed to be around 1/4 of the way along its path. I tried with other similar sized objects and got the same result.

Resizing with zoom to 12 still produced the same hesitation.

Peter

[Ronniebootwest]

If this is a bug (and it sounds like it is) will it be cured in beta 10?

Ron

[Johnwnjr]

I followed Lin's suggestion but could not see any hesitation. All was as smooth as silk as they say.

John

[Lin Evans]

I suspect this is related to some changes which have been made since version 8v. I have multiple systems and my development system is the most powerful having an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro AGP card. It has been glass smooth with all versions until beta 9 but has severe issues with jerky pan in version 9a. Also I've discovered that shows created with 9a give me a "picture not found" error when I try to open in earlier versions such as 8v.

With my other systems I'm not getting this jerky movement but it's there and very plain to see with 9a.

Best regards,

Lin

I followed Lin's suggestion but could not see any hesitation. All was as smooth as silk as they say.

John

[Igor]

Dear Lin,

Please don't worry!

I just sent you email with special version. Please reply me.

[ADB]

Lin

I tried it on my system and at first I thought it looked fine but when I had a real close look, I noticed it. There is definitely something happening about 1/4 of the way through the animation and then smaller "jiggers" after that.

Andrew

[JPD]

Lin

I tried it on my system and at first I thought it looked fine but when I had a real close look, I noticed it. There is definitely something happening about 1/4 of the way through the animation and then smaller "jiggers" after that.

Andrew

There are 2 different problems.

First, often a PZR effect start after a little time, I had this problem with V8 and have no solutions, a second problem "smaller jigers" can be correct by different method. We can see easily them when the power of the card is low but also with powerfull card but there are small.

The reason is that the total of calculation change during the effect.

For instance if a PZR begin at the beginning of an effect between 2 views, there will be a jigger at the end of the effect. If a full screen picture have a zoom betwen 0.001% and 100% you can have a jigger.

What I do to correct that is to have always the same calculation to do for all the duration of the PZR effect. For instance for the zoom, I put a second time the picture of the zoom under the others. I change the opacity with 2 keypoints (1ms between them) at the beginning of the PRZ effect from 0% to 0.4% and at the end from 0.4% to 0% in order there aren't more calculations before and after the PZR effect. During the PZR effect, I put on this second picture that we don't see an effect at the opposite of the first on (zoom from 100% to 0%), generally it's enough, if not, I put a keypoint in the middle of the effect and change zoom 50% by zoom 87% in order to have a better linearity for the number of calculaltion.

Another exemple if I have a picture outside of the screen which come to the screen with a pan effect, there is often a jigger, so I put under all the object a copy of this picture that I put at opacity of 0.4% only during the effect and which is in the screen when the original picture is outside and is outside when original is inside, the 2 pictures have the same speed, so that the number of pixels inside the screen for both is always the same, with this method there are absolutely no jiggers even on old graphic card. There is only more calculations to do but always the same quantity from the beginning to the end of the PZR effect.

I have use this method on several Diapositif's members slideshows and the result is always good on all the PC of Diapositif members.

Look at the slideshow "Ombres et lumières" on Diapositif (thanks to Michel Carl).

Normal version here

Version modified with this method here

[Lin Evans]

Problem solved on my system per Igor's suggestion to disable my sound card. After disabling my Sound Blaster Audigy card, the problem with the jerky pan went away. I was expecting to see it re-appear when I again enabled the sound card, but it didn't!

Everything works now as smoothly as before. Igor is running more tests now and will have more information later.

Lin

[Igor]

It seems that sound card returned incorrect time values. We're thinking now how to prevent this problem with smoothness in case of this situation.

[Ronniebootwest]

I am amazed at the simplicity of this solution, i.e. disabling and then enabling the sound card. Just goes to show that the KISS principle works! No need for these highly technical solutions at all!

Ron

[Lin Evans]

Hi Ron,

It was more of a serendipitous discovery than a "fix". We know why disabling the sound card "fixed" the issue with the smoothness of movement, but what is still to be understood is why the problem didn't return when the card was re-enabled.

As much as is presently known about electronics and signal interactions, there is still much to be discovered. There are so many different combinations of drivers, sound cards, video cards, etc., out there that it constantly amazes me that anything works as expected.

We indeed owe a great debt of gratitude to Igor and the team for the fantastic job they have done in bringing us this fantastic software which is even more amazing when one looks at the myriad obstacles there are to successful results.

Best regards,

Lin

I am amazed at the simplicity of this solution, i.e. disabling and then enabling the sound card. Just goes to show that the KISS principle works! No need for these highly technical solutions at all!

Ron