Slow Playback in Motion 5.2

Question

Level 1

4 points

Slow Playback in Motion 5.2

I've had the same problem with several projects in Motion 5 (just upgraded to 5.2.2 -- no difference): Once the project gets to be rather "full" -- lots of still photos, but not anything that's processor or graphics intensive, playback won't go above about 15 fps (it's a 30 fps project) no matter what I do. I've tried quarter-res, draft quality, and -- this is really strange -- not even RAM preview will get above 18-19 FPS. I need to be able to preview at close to 30 fps to get things to the audio and video to line up. This never happened with earlier versions of Motion. I'm running a Late 2013 iMac with 16GB of RAM. Should be plenty of power. Seems like something weird about Motion. The projects are about 2 minutes long, and once there's a certain number of elements, even if they're small JPEGs or text, the thing just won't play above 15 FPS no matter what I do.

Thoughts?

Posted on Sep 19, 2015 7:06 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

BenB

Level 6

12,097 points

Sep 21, 2015 1:36 PM in response to childlike1

It is easy to bog Motion projects down, compositing and motion graphics eat up tons of computer resources quickly. Do you turn off features you're not using in the Render menu such as shadows, motion blur, etc? Motion is GPU intensive, and iMacs aren't the most powerful GPUs on the market. Dual GPUs help a great deal. But Motion (even AE) will bog down quickly. At least its playback performance is better than AE. So it could be worse. I'd have two see a screen shot of your project before being able to comment specifically on your personal situation.

Reply

Answer 2

childlike1 Author

Level 1

4 points

Sep 21, 2015 7:41 AM in response to BenB

Thanks so much for responding, Ben.

The particulars of this problem are especially mystifying. I think it must have something to do with Motion and/or the most recent Mac OS, rather than the computer. One strange detail is that I was having this problem a couple of months ago, prior to a complete internal hard drive failure (hard drive about 1 year old) and am still having the problem on a brand new disk with fresh installs of Motion, the OS etc. There's 609GB of free space on the hard drive.

What's strange about the problem is that I've been producing exactly this sort of project, in various version of Motion and on various Macs, including a Mac Pro from around 2006, with only rare slow-downs in playback, and only then when there was video involved. This is just smallish JPGs and type. Should not be a problem.

You can see a typical example of a final project here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_G0T6iSfWU

What seems to be happening is that a project will play back OK until I've added a certain number of elements. Then the slow-down will occur, and not even a RAM Preview will speed the FPS above 19 or so. My workaround in a previous project was actually to produce it in two halves, each of which would play back fine, then output them and paste them together. But nothing in either half was processor-intensive. It seems like Motion is just running sluggishly at a certain point, possibly based on the total number of elements in the project (not a huge number) rather than what's happening onscreen at a given time.

I've tried a ton of fixes -- turning off all the images, turning off all the text. The only thing that works is deleting several groups of text, which of course makes the project unusable.

A screen shot is attached, along with specs for the machine. In the Render menu, Lighting, Shadows, Reflections and Motion Blur are off.

Any insight anyone can provide will be appreciated. Thanks.

Michael

Reply

Answer 3

BenB

Level 6

12,097 points

Sep 25, 2015 1:06 PM in response to childlike1

Titles bog things down, period, even in FCPX, even in other apps. From your project screen shot, that is not a simple project, not with that many layers. With that many layers, I'd expect some slow down. Seems you put everything in to one single Group, which will bog things down. That Group has a motion path, with is a ton of work to move ALL of those elements in sync with each other across the video frame. Why not add a camera and have it pan across the scene? That would be less resource intensive. Also, break some stuff up into smaller Groups, that could also help.

"... and only then when there was video involved." Yes, a plain video file is easy for Motion to playback. Lots of photos (no matter how small) are simply lots of element to deal with. Tons of titles will slow things down, period. I don't think your project is as small or simple as you are thinking it is.

A brand new hard drive doesn't change the performance of your system, unless it is a faster RPM and a faster connection type.

As for the example you showed, that is something I'd do faster and easier in FCPX, not in Motion. It seems you're trying to do video editing in a motion graphics app, two very different animals created for two very different purposes.

Also, if you're doing work this intensive, and yes it is, get a fast external drive for your media and project files. It will free up data pipeline for the CPU/GPU and application to do their work on the system drive, without bogging down with all the pipeline clutter of the many different media streams. Especially for the HD frame size you're working with (and if your pictures are that frame size, they're not "small").

Finally when you do a "Clear RAM Preview" first.

Reply

Answer 4

childlike1 Author

Level 1

4 points

Sep 25, 2015 1:07 PM in response to BenB

Ben, thanks again for your input. One of your points seems to have solved it. By taking all the text and graphics items out of 1 big group and putting each set into a single layer, playback sped up. So far so good.

Reply