Video wall crashing Motion 5

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Video wall crashing Motion 5

I followed a Ripple Training 5 minute tutorial which showed how to make 4 x 4 video wall of 5 secs duration and it worked and exported perfectly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmXjnB0sNMw

My project requires a 5 x 5 video wall of 10 secs duration, so I followed the same instructions, but of course changing the number of rows and columns, the video source offset to 500 (50fps x 10secs) and the duration of the project to 10 secs.

Now I cannot export or even render the project without it either crashing Motion, or if it doesn't crash while exporting, it produces a movie which is between 3 to 4 seconds long followed by a bright yellow screen. I have tried lots of different ways to export, including send to Compressor but always with the same result.

27" 2017 iMac with 2TB SSD, 16GB Ram, Radeon Pro 580 8 GB graphics, Catalina 10.15.2. Motion 5.4.5

Does anyone have an idea whether there are some other settings to change, or is my system just not up to this level of replicators? I should say that the 25 clips in the FCPX movie I imported are all 1080p 50fps 10 secs long, and so is the Motion project

iMac 27" 5K, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jan 14, 2020 12:22 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Captain Slocum Author

Level 1

18 points

Jan 17, 2020 2:45 PM in response to Captain Slocum

Well, I have the extra 32 GB of RAM installed and it is better but still crashes. Using the system monitor and looking at the memory pressure graph it is quite clear that there is a bug with the latest version of Motion 5, at least when used with Catalina. The memory fills up until it all gets too much and Motion crashes. It has little to do with whether the video is 4k, 1080, or 720, 25fps or 50 fps, it will just crash eventually after a certain time (eg 1080p 50fps 6 x 6 crashes after 6 seconds, ditto but 25fps crashes after 9 seconds). The memory pressure graph slowly grows over time, goes into the yellow, then the red, then Motion crashes.

I have been editing in FCPX today, doing some very intensive stuff with lots of other apps open (Photoshop, Affinity designer, Lightroom and several others) and it works fine and renders without problem. I also tried doing really intensive rendering stuff in Premiere Pro and After Effects, just for comparison, and they work fine, the pressure graph stays in the green all the time. So clearly a Motion bug when rendering/sharing. Hopefully it will be sorted in the next update. I love the simplicity of Motion, but In the meantime I will have to use After Effects, which I don't know too well, for anything big.

In the meantime I have found a simple work around to the original problem. I produced 4 Motion video wall projects using a 3 x 3 grid for each (which does render for the 10secs I require), and stacked them in the timeline in FCPX at 49% scale, one in each quadrant of the screen, producing a 6 x 6 video wall. Works a treat. In fact it's better because I can zoom them and fly them around to make a more interesting wall.

Thanks for everyones interest and replies. I hope what I have written here might be of some use to others having similar problems.

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Answer 2

Jan 14, 2020 12:47 PM in response to Captain Slocum

I've happened to have Motion crashing on Rendering with Quality>Best, and not crashing with Quality>normal. Just saying.

I've also had rendering problems with multiple footage because of different audio specs (sample and/or bitrates). Maybe you can make a try: ditch all audios from the Audio tab (unlink all video-audio first or videos are trashed too) and try to render to see if this might be the cause.

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Answer 3

Jan 15, 2020 6:09 AM in response to Captain Slocum

I have a less powerful mac - 2014 15" MBP, 16GB, GeForce 750 M video card with 2GB, 512GB SSD.

I tried doing a 4x4 video wall using a replicator, as explained in the video.

As a source, I used a longish video (1080p, about 15min), but I set the duration to 10 seconds.

After chugging along for a few minutes, it brought the system down saying "your mac has run out of application memory". At the time, Motion was using some 77GB of (virtual) memory.

Then I tried a similar one, except starting with a short video (1 minute 20 seconds), and producing the same 10 seconds. It worked just fine.

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Answer 4

Jan 15, 2020 6:12 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

I have a less powerful mac - 2014 15" MBP, 16GB, GeForce 750 M video card with 2GB, 512GB SSD.

I tried doing a 4x4 video wall using a replicator, as explained in the video.

As a source, I used a longish video (1080p, about 15min), but I set the duration to 10 seconds.

After chugging along for a few minutes, it brought the system down saying "your mac has run out of application memory". At the time, Motion was using some 77GB of (virtual) memory.

Then I tried a similar one, except starting with a short video (1 minute 20 seconds), and producing the same 10 seconds. It worked just fine.

EDIT: a 5 by 5 replicator also works fine.

Bottom line: if the source movie for your replicator is too long, this may be causing Motion to gobble up on memory and crash your mac. Use a shorter movie.

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Answer 5

fox_m

Level 6

13,452 points

Jan 15, 2020 10:20 AM in response to Captain Slocum

Just go smaller. 640x360 project out of FCPX. That will be plenty large enough for a 5x5 video wall. Maybe use ProRes 422 instead of Proxy (more "native"). Don't use a large format project in Motion: 1080 at most.

Just FYI - my Mac is 27in iMac 5K Retina, i5, 24G RAM, Radeon Pro 570 4GB.

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Answer 6

fox_m

Level 6

13,452 points

Jan 17, 2020 3:25 PM in response to Captain Slocum

I think since the "big update" to Metal, there seems to be an issue in Motion with exceeding a "graphics bounding box" -- going outside this maximum boundary causes crashes. It's an oversight I expect to see corrected in the next version or two, but for now, it's a real pain. I don't think Apple has done a very good job replacing OpenGL with Metal, their new API seems rushed and incomplete (or at least several corners have been cut). I've had numerous problems with both Motion and Final Cut since the changeover. And, you'll have a very difficult time convincing me that Metal is the Performance Monster its been made out to be. On my system, Motion and FCPX have lost 10-30% (or more in some cases!!!) of the performance I was experiencing with FCPX 10.4.7 and Motion 5.4.4 on High Sierra.

— FWIW

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Answer 7

Jan 16, 2020 11:50 AM in response to fox_m

I can see that going smaller makes sense. But the effect I had in mind was to start off with a single clip on the screen and zoom out slowly until all of the wall was revealed. For this, I would need to start at 1080p. I've shot all the film in 4k but am outputting the final movie to 1080p. This gives me lots of room to pan and zoom my original footage while editing, up to 200% without losing quality. I have applied many effects, transitions, noise reduction, etc etc in real time while making this film using 4k footage without FCPX even stuttering once (I'm not even using proxy media). This is why I am so surprised that Motion can't (or my system can't) handle this.

But I've got another 32GB of RAM arriving tomorrow (which I wanted anyway, before this problem came up) so I'll get back here to let you know if it made any difference. Thank you all for your help.

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Answer 8

Jan 15, 2020 5:02 AM in response to fox_m

Many thanks Joelle184 and fox_m for your replies. I tried your suggestion fox_m, first conforming the FCPX video to 25fps, 720 wide. then following your recipe exactly. It was better, this time the export getting to 9 seconds before failing where before it was getting to about 2 seconds for a 6 x 6 50fps 1080p and 5 seconds for a 5 x 5 50fps 1080p. So the result is usuable, as I can live with the video wall only being 9 seconds.

But I wonder what is going on? The problem is reliably reproducible (I have tried about 20 different variations) and the length before it crashes is directly related to the size and number of the replicated items. It is as if something is "filling up". Could it be a memory cache of some sort? Would more RAM help? Or is it a processor problem. Advice as how to diagnose this would be gratefully received.

BTW fox_m, are you using Catalina 10.15.2, Motion 5.4.5? Could that be the problem? And what is your machine spec? Could that be the bottleneck?

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Answer 9

Jan 15, 2020 6:57 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

Thank you Luis, that's interesting. 10 seconds x 16 is 160 seconds = 2 mins 40 seconds. So how did you get the original FCPX video to 1 min 20 secs? Was each video clip 5 seconds long? If so how did that effect the outcome? Did each video on the wall loop once?

I don't get an "out of application memory" error message, but I suppose something like that is happening? Is this a RAM issue or something else? I am wondering if I should increase my RAM?

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Answer 10

Jan 15, 2020 7:43 AM in response to Captain Slocum

I was not particularly concerned with the result, I just wanted to test whether the film duration had anything to do with the crashing. By the way, using a shorter film than the offsets “required” resulted in Motion wrapping around back to the beginning (at least it looked like it; I did not check very closely).

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Answer 11

Jan 15, 2020 5:05 AM in response to fox_m

Thanks Joelle184. There is no audio in any of it, it was exported from FCPX as video only and from Motion ditto.

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Answer 12

Jan 18, 2020 12:40 AM in response to fox_m

I am sure you are right fox_m. It fits in with my observations exactly.

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Answer 13

fox_m

Level 6

13,452 points

Jan 14, 2020 8:06 PM in response to Captain Slocum

I can build a 5x5 10 second project.

First, you do not need 50fps and you do not need 1080 media. Create a project that is 1280x720 at 24 or 30fps. Source Offset will then only be 300, and you can set the project to 10 seconds. Export as ProRes Proxy (this is not the same as Proxy Media inside FCPX!)

Where you might have run into trouble is the original length of the Motion project. The project length needs to be 25(clips)x10seconds or approximately 250 seconds or 4 minutes and 10seconds (plus about 25 extra frames) — in other words, the exact length of your video source. Set up your Replicator, then set the project length to 10 seconds before exporting the finished project.

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Video wall crashing Motion 5

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