Why is it that Maya finds it soooo hard, soooooooo painful, to play 1) image planes 2) image sequences 3) by and large any video files
when: 1) the same files can be scrubbed at lightning speed by other applications on the same machine 2) the image sizes are perfectly reasonable (between 300 and 700 across, and yes, sometimes square) 3) the files are on a local drive.
Am I missing something? Do I need to upgrade? I am running Maya 7. Is this something that has been adressed in m8 or 8.5? It really makes using this program difficult for animation, which is, after all, the point, right?
Because you've not enabled caching. Or more likely your not having a pro card. Now dont blame me inm just the messenger here.
Also if you just play the image sequence in quicktime for example your not loading up 500 megabytes of other crap into the stream. However use the maya live plane its slightly faster.
BUT: Nvidia, Ati and matrox decided in their infinite wisdom to not implement full openGL in their consumer range cards. OpenGL on the other hand REQUIRES you to define ALL OR NONE OF IT, thus when you encounter a feature not enabled by your card, it drops the functionality to software rasterizing (giving you 1/100 of the speed). And maya uses overlay panes to draw the image planes which is one of those things
Not everyone can afford to drop $10,000 on a computer...
If you compare Maya's video performance to that of Max under similar conditions, I think you will find that Max is the speedier of the two. Also, I don't know if this has been fixed in v8.x, but Maya 7 had a tendency to get quite confused when you scrubbed the timeline, and would play the frames out of order. This was on HP boxes from about three years ago, with decent Quadro cards.
