Can you throttle fps into a shader / plugin? Multi-threaded rendering not available?

Questions
1

A Vuo plugin is affecting VDMX performance pretty badly, and it doesn’t need the 60fps we’re sending it. Is there any way to throttle this?

I saw in the documentation a reference to changing framerates per layer with multi-threaded rendering, but I don’t see an option to enable that anywhere in Preferences.

Thanks

2

Hey!

It sounds like you are talking about the hidden ‘Displays Drive Canvas Rendering’ setting – when this is turned off, you can specify the FPS for each individual layer or group.

However, this doesn’t cover Vuo / QC based plugins. Offhand I’m not sure how feasible it would be for us to add this, as we try to keep data-sources and rendering in sync, but this is a noteworthy use case so I’ll put it on our to do list to see if this would be possible.
(Please feel free to email us a copy of your Vuo plugin and a VDMX project file for us to use for testing! Always useful for us to have real world cases so we know what we are dealing with.)

In the meantime, your best bet might be to try to find a way to throttle from within the Vuo composition itself, skipping the work it is doing if it is still computing.

PS. If you are looking for that hidden setting, in the Rendering preferences, if you scroll to the bottom, there is a place to access the advanced rendering prefs. We strongly recommend against using these, as they are for our own experimenting with different types of rendering methods… so they are definitely use at your own risk, and if anything weird happens, try restoring to the default settings immediately!

3

Thanks for the info - very interesting. Howie and I have been making optimizations in the plugin, as you suggest and it’s just about acceptable at this point. This is the ‘Motion Amount’ plugin, that turns out to be a very useful value for driving reactions. We have to send the plugin a tiny image (127x72) because processing any larger is too costly at 60fps.

(Perhaps a simple way to handle cases like this without getting into a sync mess would be an option to send every other frame to the plugin regardless of VDMX frame rate?)