I’m running into a persistent issue when working with larger video-heavy sets.
Setup
Ableton Live 12.3.2
EboSuite 2.3
Apple Silicon Mac (M1 Max, 64 GB RAM)
Videos are ProRes Proxy, constant frame rate (23,98), stored on internal SSD, very low res files (maximum 256x144)
When I load a Live set that contains a large number of video clips, one EboSuite video channel will consistently fail to render video (black output). Which channel fails changes from load to load, but once a channel is “dead” it stays that way for the entire session.
This happens immediately after loading the set, before playing anything.
There is no problematic or corrupt clip involved.
Reloading the set changes which channel breaks.
Disabling / re-enabling devices does not recover it.
The first video channel in the set tends to show very high performance impact right after loading, and that channel often ends up being the one that doesn’t render video.
This seems tied to the amount of video clips present in the set, not playback load or video format. Once the clip count gets high enough, one video channel fails during load and never recovers.
My goal is to work reliably with larger numbers of video clips in a single Live set. I suspect this might be caused by video clips being indexed or preallocated at load, and I’m hoping this is something that could be improved to better support larger clip libraries.
thanks for the detailed report, sorry you’re running into playback issues!
How many clips are we talking about?
Indeed each clip caches some data so that the playback can start quick enough in unpredictable situations(like midi controller triggers during live performances).
The resolution you mentioned is really small, so in case of non-HAP codec I think a clip would take roughly 0.5mb of memory, so that means 1gb would hold about 2000 prores clips, and you have 64gb… so something else might be at play here.
I know you said that it doesn’t seem related to the video format, but could you confirm that having the same set but only with HAP clips also causes issues?
Apple’s hardware decoder (used for prores and h264) can also sometimes overload without telling us, and it could also result in behavior you see.
It would be of great help if you could send us the set&media privately so we could investigate further(you can upload it on google drive or send it via wetransfer to our support email).
thanks,
nesa
ps. I’m chiming in as a 3d engine/video playback person - there might be something else going on in other parts of our system that could exhibit this behavior and having a set to examine would be of great help.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I’ve successfully batch converted all videos to hap. The problem persists. I’ll prep an upload. Appreciate the assistance!