by thriftshopxl on 08 Sep 2011, 11:07
Hi guys,
I did a VJ set this weekend. All was OK for the first hour during the time I supplied visuals-only for the other DJs. Before my own set, I decided to reboot and get everything ready for my hour-long AV show after the band that would play for the next half hour.
The problem?
I lost all video preview and output. There was nothing but a black screen on the left or right preview panes. There was nothing in the centre preview pane, just black also.
However, I could clearly see the tiny thumbnail timelines for each channel, just above the waveform indicators (that contained all the cue info) as loaded up each video. I could hear my videos but I could not see them and my output was just a black signal.
I looked at my faders, looked at my sliders, both on the hardware and on-screen but everything was as it should be.
I closed Vfx and restarted - I got the same issue. I closed Vfx, rebooted my machine and got the same issue. I tried an MP3-only Mediabase with built-in visualization but had the same issue. In fact, Mixvibes didn't even let me click on the visualizations to change them.
I closed the software, re-opened (without rebooting) and got the same issue again, so I re-closed the software, re-opened the software (again, without rebooting), opened my original video mediabase and... IT WORKED!
With minutes to spare I was able to do my show as intended, but I decided NOT to try any fancy video or audio effects, Flash overlays or my HD webcam (as the software has sometimes crashed when using these all together at the same time).
So, I was only beatmatching and everything worked almost fine - except in one instance when an SD MP4 video stuck (the audio played OK) on a single frame for around 30 seconds (it has not done this before on SD MP4s).
I play mainly self-converted SD MPEG4 with highest bitrate audio, but also have a few VOB and MPEG2 DVD-conversions which I don't like to use with looping or effects due to the garbled images at the loop points.
The loss of video output only happened once before when I first got the software (and played only VOBs/MPEG2s) but I believed that it was only down to my lack of experience and knowledge.
I have tried to replicate this issue but can't yet. Anyone any ideas on this? Why is it intermittent?
Just to confirm my specs - I have a 6 months old Alienware i7, 1.5gb Nvidia card, 8gb RAM, 128gb Crucial SSD & a 500gb 7200rpm internal media drive. Wi-fi was off, no dongles, no webcam, nothing else in any USB sockets, no other software running, nothing.
I was NOT using the latest release candidate.
Any light that can be shed on this problem would be very much appreciated. Thanks.
