I have a show running on 2 catalyst systems. 1 of the systems is a standard uk rental configuration and outputs 2 800x600 feeds. All material is encoded photo jpeg at medium quality at 25fps. All clips play unity scale and, unless stills, play oncefw>0.

Most of the show consists on crossfading video on both outputs simultaneously. In the main this has worked flawlessly but there are 2 points in the show where the system has regularly glitched. Both these cues are crossfades after the system has been playing out a long 8 minute clip for about 6 minutes. The long clips are of very active surface water reflections. The outgoing video has regularly paused at this point for a few frames or one or both screens has blanked for a second or so.during the crossfade

The first remedy I applied was to preload the incoming clips. This improved reliability but didn?t eradicate the problem. I then re compressed these clips using less than medium quality, the data rate is now well under 1MB/s I then changed the preloaded clips to stills by preloading and only using the inframe in the cue. Effectively then I am crossfading 2 preloaded still frames IN with 2 running video clips OUTt. I thought this had sorted it but on Saturday the outgoing video froze for a second at the point the crossfade started.

I am convinced this behaviour is related to the length of running video preceding the crossfade rather than due to some vagaries of the rental system because the other system on the show (Catalyst 3.31 on a G5 Quad running 10.4.4 with QT7 etc) has glitched, very occassionally, momentarily at exactly the same points.

One other surprising aspect of this is that when the system glitched badly (i.e before I converted the incoming cues to stills) and blanked the screens one of the projectors actually lost sync (the resolution message came up on screen when it regained it a couple of seconds later.) The projectors are fed with Smart E vga to CAT5 systems. I can understand the system not being able to find a frame to output but not this disturbing the output sync.

Finally, the only feature of Catalyst I have difficulty getting along with is the fact that it outputs black (or more accurately a transparent layer) whenever it has any delay in loading a clip . If it didn?t do this you could just jump from clip to clip (or still to still) on a single layer when all you wanted were hard cuts which would make programming so much easier. Why can?t the system say to itself ? have I got a new valid video frame to place on this layer?? and just hold on to what it has when the answer is no. If I don?t tell it I want a black screen I don?t expect it to give me one, ever!

Mic