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Home ? Tech Help ? So much potential, so many bugs

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16/04/2013 12:30:25

ekholbrook
ekholbrook
Posts: 9 		Downloaded last night and basically the app is so easy to use I was making a music video of my music in minutes.

Problem is.... there are quite a few issues going on here not related to the interface (the interface, directing, etc etc is great) .. it's the other stuff that make this app almost unusable unless they are addressed.

Quick summary of my equipment:

3.3ghz quad core i5
Win 7/64bit. 16 gigs of RAM
1 gig Nvidia GeForce GT 430
800 gigs free HD space on main drive

Downloaded/running the full install of the 64 Bit version of this app.


1) Saving the file causes an error (whether true or not, but it's disconcerting).

2) After recording actions for a character and stopping, it can take FOREVER to get the program back responsive. I recorded a 4 minute piece and literally waited close to 15 minutes for the app to come back alive (and yes, it did... eventually... which was a life saver because I had forgotten to save recently). But I don't what the deal here is. Recording for a few minutes on a character track and then you have to wait sooooooo long to keep working. With the CPU of course only maxing out at 25%.

3) Loading an mp3 as the audio track causes immediate crash. So I converted my song to a wav which the app told me was rather large (well... duh. that's why we compress audio!!)

4) Does not utilize multiple cores, so the app was churning away when I went to save out the final movie, yet only 25% of the CPU was being used. A little disappointing. And more so because of # 5 below

5) Saving out uncompressed AVI, the resulting movie is invalid. This last one just pushed me over the edge. It created a 4gig file for a 6 minute clip that took nearly 3 hours to generated. Obviously no GPU processing going on to help out here, not using all cores. But of course the killer is...

..I CAN"T PLAY THE MOVIE!!

Sorry to yell there, but really man, this is totally frustrating.
edited by ekholbrook on 16/04/2013
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16/04/2013 14:07:12

Marco_D
Marco_D
Posts: 582 		Hi ekholbrook,

Sorry to hear that you having so much problems with Muvizu.

I'll try to help you stop those annoying crashes and issues.
Looking at your hardware details I see nothing wrong with it. Just a good machine.

So lets, get started.
Can you please take some screenshots of the errors / crashes and send it to bugs@muvizu.com
Please attach your nickname to the subject.

Also can you send us your DirectX details - Dxdiag.txt

Here's how you can generate it:
1. Click on Windos "START" button
2. Select the "run" option
3. Type in "dxdiag" and click "OK"
4. Check through the tabs and perform all tests
5. Click "Save all Information..." and save the text file to a location of your choice

Hopefully we will be able to gather details about these issues.

Cheers,
Marco
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16/04/2013 15:33:00

ekholbrook
ekholbrook
Posts: 9 		I'll send what I can. Unfortunately the errors don't show anything particular. For example I tried saving out the movie again to AVI, uncompressed which I figured would have the least problems, and again, while the app showed it saved out ok and was ready to view, the AVI will not open in anything, windows, quicktime, moviemaker, premier, etc. No "error" per se, just a "cannot open this file" message.
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16/04/2013 16:48:04

Marco_D
Marco_D
Posts: 582 		Hello again ekholbrook,

Do you have any codecs installed?
If not I can recommend you one that will give you less problems, hopefully

Codecs can be a bit tricky and then cause you problems when you are trying to make a video.

Cheers,
Marco
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16/04/2013 16:57:06

ekholbrook
ekholbrook
Posts: 9 		Marco_D wrote:
Hello again ekholbrook,

Do you have any codecs installed?
If not I can recommend you one that will give you less problems, hopefully

Codecs can be a bit tricky and then cause you problems when you are trying to make a video.

Cheers,
Marco


I'm sure that's probably the issue. Definitely let me know what you recommend. I have pretty much the default stuff that comes with windows7 (which is basically next to nothing) and haven't installed any codec packages to my knowledge. Don't know if it applies but remember I'm running Windows 7/64 bit, not 32.

Which brings me to the other issue I was considering is that perhaps it's the 64bit version of this that's a little cranky and even though I'm running Win7/64bit, I might give the 32bit version a try and see if I have better success. I've seen that happen with several other applications (especially media creation ones - "reaper" comes to mind, among others). Just seems like many of the base plugins and codes prefer the 32 bit app... or something like that.
edited by ekholbrook on 16/04/2013
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16/04/2013 19:29:02

gimmick
gimmick
Posts: 179 		Hello,

some tips that I use for my musical videos :

- I don't use uncomp rendering (files too big) but some 64 bits codecs like
Lagarith Lossless codec / HuffYUV v2.1.1 / FFdshow MJPEG
( I use windows7 64 bits & Muvizu 64 bits)

- I use an external video editing software (Sony vegas).
==> so my Muvizu files are short, around 20 to 60"
==> so I use small mono WAV files in Muvizu

I use the final WAV stereo mix only in the external video editing software

I hope this helps
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16/04/2013 19:44:10

ekholbrook
ekholbrook
Posts: 9 		gimmick wrote:

...
I use the final WAV stereo mix only in the external video editing software

I hope this helps


Definitely helps and gives me a thought which is to remove the audio file prior to rendering and see if that helps.

the one codec that works (in this app) saving out is the Microsoft video however that too has issues, for example just re-rendered animation and first 30 seconds was like I was watching a TV station in a hotel that hadn't been tuned correctly, with horizonal colored lines, then the picture going up.... then about 30 seconds, was fine for 4 minutes.... then just died. Was playable... but again, just weird issues.

I DO have several animation / video apps (premier as I said, windows movie maker (everyone has), Vue 11 (3D Raytracing Landscape, etc), and Reallalusion IClone (similar idea as this app), Poser 9, none of which has these issues, so I'm rather baffled of the cause.
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16/04/2013 19:45:58

ziggy72Muvizu mogulExperimental user
ziggy72
Posts: 1988 		ekholbrook wrote:
4) Does not utilize multiple cores, so the app was churning away when I went to save out the final movie, yet only 25% of the CPU was being used. A little disappointing. And more so because of # 5 below

Yeah, I complained about this one ages ago - it's a limitation of the Unreal engine, and without moving to a different game engine is unlikely to change (in the near future at least).

ekholbrook wrote:
5) Saving out uncompressed AVI, the resulting movie is invalid. This last one just pushed me over the edge. It created a 4gig file for a 6 minute clip that took nearly 3 hours to generated. Obviously no GPU processing going on to help out here, not using all cores. But of course the killer is...I CAN"T PLAY THE MOVIE!!

59 seconds - that's your limit per clip. Of course, Muvizu can output up to 20 minutes in one shot, but there's a file size limitation in windows which messes up playback of files larger than 2gb with audio, and using the high-end codecs always creates enormous (but nice looking) files. Compile your sub 1 minute clips in a video editor, then export it from that instead. Muvizu isn't good at creating a final edit. If you really need longer shots, then use a lesser codec to keep the file size down below the 2gb cutoff.

As for your other problems, you can get around a lot of that by using the older 23b version of Muvizu, not the new Muvizu Play which has...issues Hope any of this helps.
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18/04/2013 13:34:01

ekholbrook
ekholbrook
Posts: 9 		Don't know about the 59 seconds per clip. Using the free version with watermark and didn't have any issues going into the 7 minute mark.

Couple things seemed to resolve my issues..

and btw, here is my resulting "music" video which I put up last night (uploaded to my account as it was not in a state where I'd upload from the app directly). There is a bit of post editing as I switched scenes, had to rip out the audio and put back in, slow down some parts, etc. Watermark intact thought

(btw, it's 720p, so be sure to view fullscreen in HD! LOL)



if anyone wants to add to muvizu gallery feel free... Since I went the other route, saved out, upped to my own account, I wouldn't know then how that works.

But anyway, what helped me was several things:

1) uninstalled the 64bit version. Prob not necessary but just figured I'd go with the 32 which probably had more dev time put into it.

2) Installed the Klite codec pack which allowed me to save out to an AWESOMELY tiny h264 format (entire 6 minute clip at 1280x720 came in around 100 megs and looked incredible complete with audio track). Unfortunately only 2 of my apps recognized it (windows movie maker and Vreveal) so I had to do a little conversion prior to editing in premier.

3) Told the app affinity to just use 2 cores. 1 core didn't seem to be enough as it needed like 10% of another core to keep the total CPU useage around 33%. Go figure.

4) I had complained that after direction a characters actions it seemed to take forever to 'compute' and have the app come back to life. It's partly my fault and partly the app. I had ALOT of character direction, head bobs, moving, playing, at times some characters I'd be pluggin in about 3 movements every 2 seconds or so. So the timeline was thick with actions. THAT... was what was taking so long for the app to compute after I stopped recording. I went back and deleted their tracks and tried to be more "efficient" and this seemed to help quite a bit.
edited by ekholbrook on 18/04/2013
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18/04/2013 13:49:24

Lev_Dynamite
Lev_Dynamite
Posts: 157 		ekholbrook wrote:
if anyone wants to add to muvizu gallery feel free... Since I went the other route, saved out, upped to my own account, I wouldn't know then how that works.
To add videos to the Muvizu Gallery outwith the app, you can just click the bright pink "Upload" button that should be in the bar at the top of every page on the website and then select the "Upload A Video" link.

Cool video, and great tips on managing set file / output size problems!
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18/04/2013 13:59:20

ekholbrook
ekholbrook
Posts: 9 		Lev_Dynamite wrote:
To add videos to the Muvizu Gallery outwith the app, you can just click the bright pink "Upload" button that should be in the bar at the top of every page on the website and then select the "Upload A Video" link.


Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately I've already uploaded it to my account and I notice the above route sort of does the same thing. So I think I'll leave alone for the moment as I don't want two of the same video showing up on my YouTube page.
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18/04/2013 14:14:36

Marco_D
Marco_D
Posts: 582 		Hi ekholbrook,

I'm glad that things are getting sorted.

It seems the community is giving you a hand as well, which is good to see.
Definitely the codecs you installed and the Lagarith Lossless codec are the best to use. In my humble personal opinion

I hope you are having a better experience with Muvizu now.

Cheers,
Marco
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18/04/2013 20:23:26

ziggy72Muvizu mogulExperimental user
ziggy72
Posts: 1988 		Marco_D wrote:
Definitely the codecs you installed and the Lagarith Lossless codec are the best to use. In my humble personal opinion


I've tried using the Lag codec, but it always give me a COM Surrogate error message from windows as soon as it tries to 'see' the file and put a thumbnail on it (and fails - can still load it up in Vegas, and the file size is good, but windows keeps generating COM Surrogate error messages in the background). I've had a look through the settings in the klite pack, but can't see anything that helps. Have you ever had this error, Marco?
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19/04/2013 11:39:09

Marco_D
Marco_D
Posts: 582 		Noooooooo!!!! Ziggy, the COM Surrogate error!!!!!!!!!!

How I feel your pain. Yes I did have this error, making me a very grumpy miserable man

I did managed to sort it by uninstalling other codec packs, besides the Lagarith codec.
I even think I uninstall every single codec I had. The installed Lagarith and then the K-lite.
I can however confirm that installing this codec on top of other might create problems.
It has been months now since I had the last Surrogate error though.

I hope this helps Ziggy.

Cheers,
Marco
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19/04/2013 18:48:55

ziggy72Muvizu mogulExperimental user
ziggy72
Posts: 1988 		Damn, I don't have any other codec packs installed, just k-lite and nout else, so that won't work! I'll try downloading the latest versions of k-lite and Lag, see if that helps. Otherwise, I can just stick with uncompressed - hasn't done me any harm so far Big Grin
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19/04/2013 22:28:25

WozToonsExperimental user
WozToons
Posts: 494 		ziggy72 wrote:
Otherwise, I can just stick with uncompressed - hasn't done me any harm so far Big Grin


That's what I do, saves all the grief. I use Xvid for quick rushes and .tga for final render.
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19/04/2013 22:40:50

ekholbrook
ekholbrook
Posts: 9 		WozToons wrote:
ziggy72 wrote:
Otherwise, I can just stick with uncompressed - hasn't done me any harm so far Big Grin


That's what I do, saves all the grief. I use Xvid for quick rushes and .tga for final render.


Normally that's what I'd do except in my case the uncompressed AVI simply wasn't writing correctly so sometimes it would play... sometimes not... sometimes had wavy TV interference type lines.

Plus, the codec I'm saving out to, the quality was really quite good, no noticeable blotches or hiccups or "compression" looking areas and if I weigh that file size (128 megs for a 6 minute, 1280x720 clip!) compared to 4+gigs for the uncompressed (if it even worked), was a no brainer.
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19/04/2013 22:48:12

WozToonsExperimental user
WozToons
Posts: 494 		When you go to render the video, on the file selector, the drop down menu defaults to .avi. You can change it to .tga and it will render as separate frames. You should be able to import this still image sequence into any video editor that's worth using. I often forget to change it and have to restart, it's not that obvious. This enables you to have much more freedom and control in post production.
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20/04/2013 18:23:59

ziggy72Muvizu mogulExperimental user
ziggy72
Posts: 1988 		ekholbrook wrote:
Plus, the codec I'm saving out to, the quality was really quite good, no noticeable blotches or hiccups or "compression" looking areas and if I weigh that file size (128 megs for a 6 minute, 1280x720 clip!) compared to 4+gigs for the uncompressed (if it even worked), was a no brainer.

Yes, that's great if that's the finished movie, but didn't you then have to convert it into something else to get Premiere to edit it? I'd be interested to know what format and size of file you put into Premiere. Cos I'm nosey
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21/04/2013 12:01:51

ukBertyMuvizu mogulExperimental user
ukBerty
Posts: 975 		WozToons wrote:
This enables you to have much more freedom and control in post production.


Woz - I'm interested in what you mean here. I've just done a test with .tga files (thanks for telling me how to do this - I've often wondered!).

i have recently changed to "uncompressed" or as it is in 23b "None" as my Codec. This is to simplify my workflow. I used to run everything through virtual dub but I have realised (after 18 months of religiously doing this) that all I do is end up with an uncompressed .avi file so I may as well just start like that.

I notice that in my test the individual .tga files take up even more space than my uncompressed .avi (prob around 20% more). What are the advantages in editing that you mention. All I see is that it's a lot harder to identify your shits as there are so many files.

Cheers, Berty.
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