From the course: Media Composer 8.7 Essential Training: 110

Optimize playback performance - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 8.7 Essential Training: 110

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Optimize playback performance

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If you're working with very high resolution media or complex effects, it's entirely possible your system is going to drop frames. When that happens, you have a few options available to you. You can drop the resolution of your project for example. Here in the format section of my project window, I've got this project set to 1080p and I'm operating at draft quality. If I hit playback, let's take a look at what happens on the timeline. Right away, you can see we've got problems. It's quite clear that the system's dropping frames, and that's because I've massively loaded up the layers of media and the effects that I've applied to them. Visually, it's a bit of a mess, but it illustrates the point quite nicely. When Media Composer drops frames, it'll give you these red lines along the timeline window to indicate where it's happening. You might also see blue and yellow lines. Yellow indicates that the CPU is struggling to lay back but you didn't drop any frames, and blue indicates that the storage is struggling. But again, there are no frames dropped. You can try to improve things by dropping the playback resolution. Here, I can reduce my playback quality to best performance and, in fact, why not also change the project down back to 720p, and let's try again. And I'll stop there. Well, it looks to me like it hasn't made much difference and I can tell because if I look at the top of the timeline, Media Composer is showing us here the last playback performance results, and, at the bottom, this playback performance result, and it doesn't seem to have helped all that much. So it looks to me like the challenge here may not be the CPU, but rather the speed of the storage on my machine. You'll get to know the limits of your machine as you work with it, but it's fair to say, if you're working with a lot of layers of media, you're probably going to want fast drives. You may also find that it's a specific piece of media that's causing the problem or, for that matter, a specific effect, and you can use combinations of these track enable or track monitoring buttons to reduce the workload and see if you can identify the problem. It might be that you're using an effect that's especially difficult to play back and you can perhaps use another one. Let's try this with a couple of layers turned off at the top. Well, still dropping frames, you can see it in the picture. And, of course we can see it on the timeline. But, clearly, although of course I'm stopping this part way through the playback, we can see that far fewer frames are being dropped this time around. Just as you'll become increasingly familiar with the limits of your system, you'll also discover that some effects are harder work to playback than others. You'll find that 3D effects push the CPU harder, and any effect that involves generating content, like a blur or a particle effect will also tend to be a bit of a struggle. In any case, if you render, Media Composer will be playing back a single layer of video at any time. So you don't need to worry for output.

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