User manual

Introduction : Managing VCube Essentials Resources
Page 16
Managing VCube Essentials Resources
Pyramix and VCube are powerful real-time audiovisual applications, both with the potential to play out massive
amounts of sound and HD picture data while recording audio and performing real-time editing processes. When
the resources of your workstation are understood and well balanced, multi-tasking of Pyramix and VCube is a
powerful audiovisual tool. Typically VCube can handle all video files in the SD formats efficiently and the vast
majority of HD video file formats elegantly and effortlessly on the latest multi-core Intel® CPU platforms. However,
some HD video files may prove to be highly CPU or disk intensive and tip the scale sending any system "over the
red line" causing stalls and skipped frames during playback. Thus it is important to know how to determine if a
video file is simply too demanding for real-time play out by using VCube's built-in resource diagnostic meters.
Output Page Diagnostic Tools
The Output page has three diagnostic monitoring pages which enable you to read the current status of different
points of system resource consumption and potentially detect a "bottleneck" which is hindering smooth and reli-
able playback of the most demanding HD video files.
1. System
2. Buffer
3. Playback Info
So if you encounter a file that just does not play out smoothly, check these diagnostic tools first in order to deter-
mine where the bottleneck is so that you may find a solution such as:
1. Changing the buffering scheme of VCube
2. Moving the Media file to a faster drive
3. Replacing the Media File itself in favor of a new version encoded using a faster, more efficient codec than that
used for the original encode.
Note: VCube Essentials is sold as a player only, devoid of any recording, rendering or wrapping
capabilities, so it may be necessary to use another VCube version with these capabilities acti-
vated (VCube Turnkey, XE or SE versions) or a 3rd party video processing software or editing sta-
tion to re-render or down-convert the most resource hungry HD files that persistently cause
system stalls.