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  • 1.  Multiple Opens into 1 Scene

    Posted 06-27-2016 21:56
    Hello,

    We're trying to trim down our opens in XPression to a few scenes instead of over the 100 plus scenes just for our opens. We're currently running ver. 6.2 build 3534 and want to get the best way to do this, so the producers can easily select their open and have the video/audio attached and play within a MOS environment.

    Here's what we've come up with to accomplish this: (although not sure this is the very best way to achieve what we want)

    We've created an Excel sheet with the path of the audio and video (all files are stored on the local play out machines). We'll go in every time to the Excel sheet when we get a new open and add the path of both the audio and video to a new line and of course render the video out to the XPression format storing them in the video folder or audio folder of our project. From there we've taken the Excel sheet as an ADODB data source that we've paired with the User Input Controls to give the producer a drop down menu on a global list that they can pick and choose the open they want.

    In each scene we have a "video material" and "audio material" that gets replaced through scripting that will read the file names off of the Excel sheet and play both. So far we've done this and had very slight performance increase to our project.

    Even though this seems to work pretty decent, is there a better way to accomplish this in fewer steps?

    On the Studio machine that our opens play on, we sometimes have full HD clips playing out of the other channel when attempting to play an open. We have come across 1 file that causes these new open scenes to stutter on occasion, but that file has the XPression performance at 50% all by itself, so we're figuring that it needs to be re-rendered. Is there anything we need to consider when playing 2 full HD videos on both outputs of XPression? Any other suggestions or tips to accomplish this would be greatly appreciated.

    Thanks!


  • 2.  RE: Multiple Opens into 1 Scene

    Posted 06-27-2016 23:42
    If you are on the latest generation hardware there really shouldn't be any issue with playing 2 full HD videos. Just be sure that it really is only two videos; go to the Video Cache Monitor in the Tools->Debug->Video Cache menu and make sure there are only two videos loaded and playing. Often times people will put other clips on the scene director that aren't visible in the scene without realizing those are playing as well even though they may not be visible in the scene; and this takes up resources. Also ensure the videos are converted to XPression codec. The free opensource tool MediaInfo is good to look at the clips and ensure the codec is XPVC and the bitrate is reasonable (less than 70MBps generally is good).



    #XPression


  • 3.  RE: Multiple Opens into 1 Scene

    Posted 06-29-2016 00:46
    Thanks Brian! That helps a lot to keep in mind as we combine scenes with our new XPressions
    #XPression