From: lee@hobbes.cs.umass.edu (Peter Lee) Subject: Re: QuickTime performance (was Re: Rumours about 3DO ???) <1993Apr16.212441.34125@rchland.ibm.com> <1993Apr26.170915.15833@waikato.ac.nz> Reply-To: lee@cs.umass.edu Organization: Software Development Lab, UMass, Amherst Lines: 108 In-reply-to: ldo@waikato.ac.nz's message of 26 Apr 93 05:09:15 GMT In article <1993Apr26.170915.15833@waikato.ac.nz> ldo@waikato.ac.nz (Lawrence D'Oliveiro, Waikato University) writes: Path: dime!ymir.cs.umass.edu!nic.umass.edu!noc.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!waikato.ac.nz!ldo From: ldo@waikato.ac.nz (Lawrence D'Oliveiro, Waikato University) Newsgroups: comp.multimedia,comp.graphics Date: 26 Apr 93 05:09:15 GMT References: <1993Mar31.074502.3590@aragorn.unibe.ch> <1993Apr16.212441.34125@rchland.ibm.com> Organization: University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand Lines: 67 Xref: dime comp.multimedia:6358 comp.graphics:32606 OK, with all the discussion about observed playback speeds with QuickTime, the effects of scaling and so on, I thought I'd do some more tests. First of all, I felt that my original speed test was perhaps less than realistic. The movie I had been using only had 18 frames in it (it was a version of the very first movie I created with the Compact Video compressor). I decided something a little longer would give closer to real-world results (for better or for worse). I pulled out a copy of "2001: A Space Odyssey" that I had recorded off TV a while back. About fifteen minutes into the movie, there's a sequence where the Earth shuttle is approaching the space station. Specifically, I digitized a portion of about 30 seconds' duration, zooming in on the rotating space station. I figured this would give a reasonable amount of movement between frames. To increase the differences between frames, I digitized it at only 5 frames per second, to give a total of 171 frames. I captured the raw footage at a resolution of 384*288 pixels with the Spigot card in my Centris 650 (quarter-size resolution from a PAL source). I then imported it into Premiere and put it through the Compact Video compressor, keeping the 5 fps frame rate. I created two versions of the movie: one scaled to 320*240 resolution, the other at 160*120 resolution. I used the default "2.00" quality setting in Premiere 2.0.1, and specified a key frame every ten frames. I then ran the 320*240 movie through the same "Raw Speed Test" program I used for the results I'd been reporting earlier. Result: a playback rate of over 45 frames per second. That's right, I was getting a much higher result than with that first short test movie. Just for fun, I copied the 320*240 movie to my external hard disk (a Quantum LP105S), and ran it from there. This time the playback rate was only about 35 frames per second. Obviously the 230MB internal hard disk (also a Quantum) is a significant contributor to the speed of playback. I modified my speed test program to allow the specification of optional scaling factors, and tried playing back the 160*120 movie scaled to 320*240 size. This time the playback speed was over 60 fps. Clearly, the poster who observed poor performance on scaled playback was seeing QuickTime 1.0 in action, not 1.5. I'd try my tests with QuickTime 1.0, but I don't think it's entirely compatible with my Centris and System 7.1... Unscaled, the playback rate for the 160*120 movie was over 100 fps. The other thing I tried was saving versions of the 320*240 movie with "preferred" playback rates greater than 1.0, and seeing how well they played from within MoviePlayer (ie with QuickTime's normal synchronized playback). A preferred rate of 9.0 (=> 45 fps) didn't work too well: the playback was very jerky. Compare this with the raw speed test, which achieved 45 fps with ease. I can't believe that QuickTime's synchronization code would add this much overhead: I think the slowdown was coming from the Mac system's task switching. A preferred rate of 7.0 (=> 35 fps) seemed to work fine: I couldn't see any evidence of stutter. At 8.0 (=> 40 fps) I *think* I could see slight stutter, but with four key frames every second, it was hard to tell. I guess I could try recreating the movies with a longer interval between the key frames, to make the stutter more noticeable. Of course, this will also improve the compression slightly, which should speed up the playback performance even more... Lawrence D'Oliveiro fone: +64-7-856-2889 Computer Services Dept fax: +64-7-838-4066 University of Waikato electric mail: ldo@waikato.ac.nz Hamilton, New Zealand 37^ 47' 26" S, 175^ 19' 7" E, GMT+12:00 I'm afraid I missed the start of this thread, but there are three factors that can significantly affect QuickTime's playback speed that you may want to take into account: (1) playback bit depth (things are fastest when you play a movie back at the bit depth it was compressed for, this is usually 8 or 16 bit, but other depths are (of course) possible). (2) type of scaling (QT is optimized for "double size" scaling, other scaling factors hit peformance much harder). (3) playback window position (MoviePlayer limits your window placement choices to advantagous pixel boundaries by default, I'm not sure about Premiere). Any combination of those can radically alter playback performance. Image size is, of course, another biggie. Giving the movie player lots of RAM can also make a real difference. Forgive me if these were mentioned earlier in the thread... -Peter Lee -- /-------------------- Peter E. Lee, Software Conductor ----------------------\ | Specular International, Inc. | | lee@cs.umass.edu or (413) 256-1329 (H) or (413) 549-7600 (W) | \-------- Beauty is 24 bits deep, plus eight bits of alpha channel ----------/