Performance Trouble With Shake 4.1 And Osx 10.5 Leopard With Sample Video

[user_deleted]

Dear friends of the shake community,

we have a tricky problem with OSX 10.5.x Leopard and Shake 4.1.

Our performance is much lower than we had with OSX 10.4 Tiger!
A sample:
We take a 2k "rand" node (2048 x 1556) and snapping directly a primate key node under it without any modifications.
After that we decrease the picture in the viewer and go to the channel A.
When we now shuffle the picture around the movements isn't smooth... it HACKS!

To give you a better view on the problem I made a quicktime.
http://www.vfxmike.com/shake\_leopard.mov

I tried the same thing on different macs (3 kind of mac pros, 2 Imacs, 2 Macbooks) with different OSX versions
( 10.5 10.5.2 10.5.3 10.5.4 10.5.5 ) and different graphic cards (FX 4500, 7300gt and a ATI card) and of cause with fresh installations.
(NO 8 core macs here ! so it's not the 8 core shake problem)

Its run smoothly in 10.4.x Tiger !!!
Of cause some of you may saying "why not downgrading?"
because we're using a lot of other software which only working probably with Leo

I would be very very very very very very very very thankful for any idea or help with this problem!
Maybe some of you guys can try the same I did in the video with you shake to find out if we are the only
one with this problem

Thanks so much for your ideas!

UPDATE:

OK I did some more research and found something new.

Create a 2K rand and put an saturation under it
If you set the saturation to 0 it hacks!
If you set the saturation to 0.0001 and more it's smooth !!!!!!

So I think shake has a problem with black & White pictures ?????

I uploaded a second video to show the problem with the Saturation
http://www.vfxmike.com/shake\_leopard\_2.mov

UPDATE

I made a new video with a rand and the activityview of my CPU's.
Everytime i have a Black & White image -> shake uses a lot more CPU power!

Doesn't it have to cache the image ?

Video : http://www.vfxmike.com/shake\_leopard\_3.mov

What is your experience? Did somebody know a solution ??

Best wishes
Mike

[user_deleted]

very interesting..
cant help you much in trouble shooting other then report the same bug here

macpro, 4core 2.6ghz, 6gb ram, nvidea 7300, osx 10.5.2, shake 4.1

++ chris

[user_deleted]

UPDATE:

OK I did some more research and found something new.

Create a 2K rand and put an saturation under it
If you set the saturation to 0 it hacks!
If you set the saturation to 0.0001 and more it's smooth !!!!!!

So I think shake has a problem with black & White pictures ?????

I uploaded a second video to show the problem with the Saturation
http://www.vfxmike.com/shake\_leopard\_2.mov

What is your experience? Did somebody know a solution ??

Mike

[user_deleted]

jup, good testing..

seems like scaling any b/w image in the viewer is problematic.
rgb images work well, as does the 1:1 view.

so the work around is either use a zoom node for scaling instead of the viewer..

CODE
ColorWheel1 = ColorWheel(2048, 1556, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1);
Primatte_v21 = Primatte_v2(ColorWheel1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0,
    0, "a", "a", 0, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, "80000WDcsu@B80aKCCG0@000020000036");
Zoom1 = Zoom(Primatte_v21, 0.25, xScale, "impulse", 0);

or just put the alpha in an RGB image and look at this when zooming:
CODE
ColorWheel2 = ColorWheel(2048, 1556, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1);
Primatte_v22 = Primatte_v2(ColorWheel2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0,
    0, "a", "a", 0, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, "80000WDcsu@B80aKCCG0@000020000036");
Reorder1 = Reorder(Primatte_v22, "aaaa");
Expand1 = Expand(Reorder1, 0, rLo, 0, 0, 1, rHi, 0.99, 1);

hope that helps
++ c.

ps: btw, i dont quite see why this is a problem, usually i dont thrash around my alpha views like crazy

[user_deleted]

hehe
the reason is that it use a lot of power !
so if you have some keys in your comp it slows down the complete compositing witout any reason!

[user_deleted]

UPDATE

I made a new video with a rand and the activityview of my CPU's.
Everytime i have a Black & White image -> shake uses a lot more CPU power!

Doesn't it have to cache the image ?

Video : http://www.vfxmike.com/shake\_leopard\_3.mov

[user_deleted]

it probably needs to convert the BW image to RGB for scaling and back to BW again, or it just uses a slower scaling routine in BW.
the image is cached in full res, but not in viewer res it seems, because usually the resize operation is very very fast.

as said, use a zoom node or make a macro which copies it into an monochrome RGB image if you really need to shake around your images like crazy.
++ c.