Best Practices for Optimizing VDMX Performance on M2 MBP

Questions
1

Hi

I am now using VDMX on a new M2 MacBook Pro and I am facing some performance issues, with UI responsiveness and occasional crashes during live VJing sessions.

Are there any suggested settings to optimize VDMX performance on the M2 chip? Checked M2 Macbook Air VDMX Performance? but didnt help.

Any tips on graphics settings, memory management, or other configurations would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

2

This is more of a general overview to optimize performance. Not M2 specific.

  1. Make sure you have the latest version of VDMX (especially if you are running the latest operating system ((Currently OSX Sonoma and VDMX 1.0.1))).
  2. Make sure your media is optimized. HAP, ProRes are okay, but if you are using MP4s you will need to make sure every frame is a keyframe. The reason for this has been well covered in the vdmx docs and elsewhere on this forum. Video Codecs and VDMX | VIDVOX Documentation
  3. Check your memory. 8GB of Memory just won’t cut it for intensive projects. Check Activity Monitor to see your memory load, and if you are low on system memory, then make sure you have extra SSD internal storage. It is a terrible idea to fill up your internal SSD. Your mac will use it for SWAP when you are running low on RAM storage.
  4. Make sure you run VDMX natively. Sure you can run VDMX under Rosetta 2 on your M2 Mac, but you won’t get the performance benefits from running it natively.
  5. Double check your media. I’m being redundant here, this is the same as #2, but the general internet seems to think all video codecs are alike. Codecs downloaded directly from YouTube, such as AV1, are not compatible with your mac (at all, Apple doesn’t support it). A lot of times people learn after loading up 1000 clips and doing a show that they have 1 bad video file that freezes their project during a performance. As a good rule of thumb. Convert all of your media if you intend to use it.