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Playback of rendered clips not visible

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Message 1 of 8
broar
989 Views, 7 Replies

Playback of rendered clips not visible

I have successfully installed Flame training 2016.1 SP1 on kickstart patched centOS6.5.

Very happy so far 😄

I tried with ALEXA prores. Nice.

However - if I render clips and press play, video hangs.
Scrubbing is fine though.

Is this maybe because of missing hardware overlay of my Geforce card?

I could afford a used quadro for learning. Should I go for a k4000 or a 6000?

Kind regards
Mikola

7 REPLIES 7
Message 2 of 8
aliasense
in reply to: broar

We have the same issue on Flame Training Edition SP1. VFX drop. Hard drive delivers frames fast enough.

Audio plays fine, but video hangs completely.

When we flush the render, the video plays fine (actually rendering in real-time so the GPU / memory / CPUs are plenty fast).

 

Did you ever find a fix?

Message 3 of 8
yann.laforest
in reply to: aliasense

Hi,

Can we please know the hardware specifications of your workstation?


Regards,
Yann

Yann Laforest

Flame Family & Smoke - Feedback Community Manager / Sr. QA Analyst
Autodesk Canada Co. 10 rue Duke Street
Montréal (Québec) Canada H3C 2L7
Direct 514 954-7241

[logo]
Yann Laforest

Program Manager Data Analytics - Autodesk EMS
10 rue Duke Street
Montréal (Québec) Canada H3C 2L7
Message 4 of 8
aliasense
in reply to: yann.laforest

Hi Yann,

 

Thanks for getting back to us.

Here's the workstation config:

Dual E5-2620 Xeon V4

128GB RAM

Supermicro X10-DAX workstation motherboard

Nvidia GTX1080 (others on Logik have tested and say it works well)

System Drive: Samsung 950 Pro 512GB on M.2 via PCIE (NVME;UEFI)

Media Scratch Disk: Samsung 950 Pro 512GB on M.2 via PCIE (NVME;UEFI)

Plus Backup Raid 5 Array: 4x 3TB Seagate Barracuda

CentOS 7.2

 

The playback of rendered clips fails even on colored noise. Colored noise plays back in real-time if unrendered. As soon as rendered, the video stalls to 0 fps or so. The disks are fast enough per swioperf tool, and also Debug Playback shows 0 disk frames dropped. All dropped frames are on vfx (100% dropped?)

 

The system seems to work very well otherwise (Action, Motion Analysis, BFX, etc.) except for playback of rendered clips. Also if we import 4K R3D at full debayer, they system plays the clip back in real-time if unrendered. As soon as we render it (even without FX), playback stalls to almost no frame update whatsoever.

 

We tried:

a) different storage as media storage

We also tried playback from the Raid 5 (via a 2nd media storage) instead of the NVME media disk, and the effect is exactly the same.

 

b) different bios settings

We also tried some bios changes similar to the suggested BIOS changes for HP, there was no difference in behavior/performance at all unfortunately. Please note that we cannot disable UEFI because otherwise the modern NVME drives will not work at all. The HP workstation BIOS changes suggested to disable UEFI.

 

E.g. we tried:

Power:
Advanced -> CPU Configuration -> Advanced Power Management Configuration ->>>  Change “Power Technology” option to “Energy Efficient”.    
Advanced -> SATA Configuration -> Change “Support Aggressive Link Power Management” to “Disabled”.

Advanced:
Advanced -> ACPI Settings -> Disable “NUMA”. (enabled by default)
Advanced -> CPU Configuration -> Change “Hyper-Threading (ALL)” to “Enable”.  (enabled by default)
Advanced -> PCIe/PCI/PnP Configuration  “Disable” unused PCIe slots.
Advanced -> PCIe/PCI/PnP Configuration  Change “Load Onboard LAN 1 OPROM” to “Disabled”.
Advanced -> PCIe/PCI/PnP Configuration  Change “Load Onboard LAN 2 OPROM” to “Disabled”.
Advanced -> PCIe/PCI/PnP Configuration  Change “Above 4G Decoding” to “Enabled”. (negative effect: disables the console/text graphics during boot somehow)

 

Also note that when we try to license for a full flame, dlhostid gives an error. 

Note that the system has no network interface under eth0. I think nowadays the network interfaces are called enp6s followed by a number.

dlhostid (build 66) - Copyright (c) 2005 by Autodesk, Inc./Autodesk Canada Co. All rights reserved.
Please wait ...
Please wait ...
Please wait ...
Please wait ...
Error: Can't find disk with /usr/discreet
***Error: Unable to determine the host ID of this machine.

 

Not sure if this may have something to do with the playback stalling.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Message 5 of 8
aliasense
in reply to: aliasense

Quick update:

The playback of rendered clips is only not working on Training Edition.

Playback of rendered clips from disk works fine on full flame on the system.

 

The reason for this is that Training Edition encrypts the DPX files, which then stalls playback from disk.

This might be something Autodesk should tell Training Edition users in case they are evaluating a purchase of Flame based on the Training Edition.

It looks like a bug to prospective customers possibly.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Thanks to Autodesk support.

Message 6 of 8
yann.laforest
in reply to: aliasense

Hi,

 

Apologies for the late answer.

 

Out of curiosity, were your tests conducted from the exact same workstation (training edition and full Flame version)?

 

Code wise, there is no limitation in the training edition that prevents the playback of rendered frames.

 

I may be wrong but I believe that the issue might be somehow related to the workstation itself rather than to the training edition specifically.

 

 

 

Please let us know when you will get a chance,

 

 

 

Regards,

Yann

 

 

Yann Laforest

Program Manager Data Analytics - Autodesk EMS
10 rue Duke Street
Montréal (Québec) Canada H3C 2L7
Message 7 of 8
aliasense
in reply to: yann.laforest

Hi Yann,

 

"Out of curiosity, were your tests conducted from the exact same workstation (training edition and full Flame version)?"

Yes, this is on the same workstation. 

 

"Code wise, there is no limitation in the training edition that prevents the playback of rendered frames."

There seems to be a performance bottleneck with the decoding of DPX files in Training Edition.

The DPX source files in Training Editions are somehow encrypted (looks like random noise). When playback those files, playback stalls.

On full Flame the DPX files are not encrypted and playback works fine.

 

This is with 2017 SP1.

 

Hope this helps.

Message 8 of 8
yann.laforest
in reply to: aliasense

Hi,

 

Apologies for the late answer and thanks for getting back to us.

 

There is indeed an encryption mechanism in the training editions which may cause latency, especially when using high resolution media.

 

This is most likely what you experienced here.

 

The training editions were created more in a learning context, not for performance benchmarking purposes.

 

We recommend the users who would like to evaluate the application in a production environment before acquiring a Flame subscription to contact one of authorized resellers and ask for an evaluation license.

 

We acknowledge that this should be mentioned in the training editions documentation.  We will look at it.

 

 

Please let me know if you have any questions,

 

 

Regards,

Yann

Yann Laforest

Program Manager Data Analytics - Autodesk EMS
10 rue Duke Street
Montréal (Québec) Canada H3C 2L7

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