VDMX Beta 8.7.2.11 now ready for testing! (M1/Intel)

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Make sure to encode your H264 video files with a keyframe for every frame or put the HAP files on an external drive.

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How about for the crashes on launch?

Your mac should still generate a crash log in the console that you can send to support at vid vox.

Also screen sharing with Apple TV works again! Thanks a lot!! Really appreciated!

Edit: Realised I wasn’t even using the M1 / universal binary / demo :smiley:

Anyways: Fantastic job!

Maybe a feature request for the release: There are so many nice color themes posted here – would be nice to see some included. The ones included look like they were designed to look good next to Windows 3.11 :P I remember the very eaaaarly version of VDMX which had a super awesome dark color theme … we should get back to that. Of course I have my theme somewhere hidden on old backups …

Edit: is there a known thing with vuo patches not working?

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Hi! I’m new here, but a long-time appreciator of vidvox software. I have an M1 Max, and this beta works quite well - with maybe one exception: in Rosetta mode, waveclock doesn’t seem to provide useful results. Every track I tried yielded roughly the same (unstable) BPM. What’s the best way for me to file an actionable report about this? Note that I’m pretty new to VDMX, so I’m not totally sure what to expect from waveclock, or even if I’m using it correctly.

(time passes)

Well never mind, I made a small test track to convince myself waveclock is really broken and not just confused by my taste in music - turns out it’s not broken :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZR9B9ALBd4 - it tracks the first tempo change without missing any beats, but gets behind by one beat on the second tempo change. That’s probably normal, though it does make me wonder if there’s an advanced config for waveclock hiding anywhere…

Cheers, and looking forward to the released version!

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One other thing I’d like to mention: the movie recorder is limited to around 90 fps - which I realize is totally not a problem for most people. I doubt this is your fault, since I see the same behavior with other AVFoundation-based capture stacks. I’m not sure exactly what OBS does differently (other than use of a software x264 encoder), but so far OBS is the only way I’ve been able to get decent 120 fps screen captures. Here’s a quick sample: https://youbeill.in/scrap/obs-120-fps-screencap.mov. I ran this through Compressor in video-passthrough mode just to get the 120 fps time track in QuickTime player. If you download the file and play it in QuickTime Player (the browser player is probably not sufficient), then frame by frame towards the end when I’m toggling mission control, you can easily see updates every frame - otherwise, it’s often just the mouse cursor that updates at 120 fps. Speaking of QuickTime player, I don’t know how to tell it to not treat clips as ‘slow motion’ clips, which means you need to drag the slow motion handles to either side of the timeline to play back at normal speed - or use a different player like Iana or mpv (my utility player of choice).

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Unfortunately, waveclock was made by the developer wavesum who’s no longer around. So its unsure what the future will be for that plugin, unless the reappear with a Apple Silicone native version.

As for the movie recorder, I put it on the update request list to support 120fps. Are you able to use Syphon recorder? I’ve never counted FPS on that, or you can always use Syphon to pump your feed into OBS and record from there.

How does the video player iina work with your 120fps clips? https://iina.io/

+1 for MIDI send not working. Def difficult to operate a show with minimal lighting without the LED feedback.

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Ah, understood. Perhaps I can rig up something with Vuo’s beat detector. That might be a bit expensive compared to waveclock… I’ll do some measurements.

:thinking:

I bet there’s a thing that takes an audio signal, performs beat detection, and publishes beat / tempo data to OSC. I’ll look.

Great, thanks - although I think this will be a no-op for you, because the movie recorder design is super smart and very future-proof. Somebody could do a TED talk about this thing, it’s such a clear expression of good design values. It might have bullets like

  • easy to please - only one required parameter!
  • expressive - tons of options. truly optional options.
  • embrace of composability
    • pass-through as a lifestyle
    • faithful representations; raw value types

anyway, I digress. To sum up: I bet the logjam with 120 fps movie export is in Apple’s frameworks.

Great suggestion. This basically works - and for a similar reason: Syphon Recorder also doesn’t presume to know my maximum frame rate:

image
I made a quick test composition in Vuo with the aim of accurately measuring Syphon itself, so I can verify a) whether Syphon Recorder can record every frame presented to it without dropping any, and b) whether the source of frames is maintaining the expected rate. It’s not fully polished but I’m attaching it for the curious.

frame-delta.vuo.zip (3.1 KB)

It toggles the background color every frame, making it easy to see any kind of frame drops or stutters in realtime. There are also counters and timers in the frame images which can be compared with what your video player says when you play it back. Here’s a short demo of the analysis procedure, which includes one false start that might not have actually been a false start…

(the ‘persistence of vision’ effect exploited by the test video doesn’t really work when it’s a 60 fps screen cap of a 120 fps source…but that’s not the point here anyway)

… and here’s a link to the script I used to plot the frame intervals: plotframetimes.py.

Just dandy. You can see it a bit in the video. Of course, frame counters in video players are generally all wrong in different ways at different times - that’s why it’s important to get a second and third opinion. In the video, I used Iina, Quicktime Player, and a guaranteed-frame-accurate analysis driven by my plotframetimes.py script.

Part of the motivation for doing this much analysis was to make a strong case for why it would be cool if there was an arm64 build of Syphon Recorder… and that would be cool, but I think I’ve also proven that it’s already good enough to do 120 fps without any drops.

However, Syphon output from VDMX isn’t able to consistently maintain 120 fps. I haven’t yet tried to optimize the VDMX workspace to reduce overhead as much as possible, though.

Cheers!

I got closer with just a basic checkerboard with an LFO hooked up to translate x and y. I set the render mode to single buffered, closed all the windows - even set the main output to all black, since the syphon sender will happily attach directly to a layer source. With this setup, the output is still a bit jittery:

Also, there’s a mistake in the screen recording I posted earlier. I ran the frame rate analysis script on the Compressor output instead of on the raw Syphon recording. The syphon recording from Vuo actually looks more like this:

I don’t really expect to achieve a solid 120 fps screen recording while I’m doing anything worth looking at - mostly I’m just poking and prodding to make sure there’s no low-hanging fruit. Related to the Syphon tests, the only easy thing I can think of is a native ARM64 build of Syphon Recorder, which should be easy since the Syphon framework itself is already in good shape for ARM.

Have you considered open sourcing Syphon Recorder? I went looking for the source some months ago to do an ARM64 build, but alas - didn’t find it :)

Thanks,
-dre

Dear ProjectileObjects.

I want to know if the waveclock/beat detector will be transported to the M1 Apple Silicon native VDMX version soon. Im asking you this, because the beat detection is a very important part of my performances and if its not there in future releases, I can save a fortune not buying a M1MAX.

Like always, many thanks for this great piece of software.
Cheers from Brazil

I think that would be a vade v002 question. http://syphon.v002.info/

I doubt it right now. Waveclock at this point is essentially vaporware. They stopped development, stopped responding to messages, and all but vanished any and all waveclock support. Since their code is not open source. Someone would have to rebuild / recreate their work from scratch in order to make it Apple Silicone native.

At the moment, all we can do is pray or ping and hope that they’ll open source their code for us to be able to update it.

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I am praying here.
many thanks ProjetileObjectes

FYI, https://discourse.vidvox.net/t/vdmx-beta-8-7-2-13-now-ready-for-testing-m1-intel/

New version out that address the midi out fix. It still needs another update for the media bin midi out colors, but this should help with many of your concerns.

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Hi @dreness, following up on this. The VDMX movie recorder is actually limited to the FPS of your monitor. If you adjust your screen to run at 120Hz you’ll get 120FPS recordings.

Not sure if this helps, but it’s a curent work around.

still dragging my feet on switching to apple silicon.

is there a faq about the transition status? whats working, whats not, moving from intel best practices.

(sorry i realize this might just be more work for vidvox, but info seems to be scattered across several discussion threads)

edit - im seeing this thread that might be most of what i was looking for VDMX MacOS X 14 Sonoma Update Guide (Updated 10.30.23)

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Pulse works for BPM detection, mabye not as tight as Waveclock but good enough > https://hybridconstructs.com/pulse/

macOS Ventura 13.6.4 (22G513)
MacBook Pro 15-inch, 2017 (Radeon Pro 560 4 GB)
VDMX Version b0.8.7.2.11

UI issues drawing the Audio Analysis plugin gain slider handle. The function works, I can change the gain level.

Update: also happening on MacBook Pro M2.

@2bitpunk for Ventura and Sonoma use the latest version of VDMX. Those issues were fixed from b8.8.0.5 and up. At this point b8.7.2.11 should only be used for older versions of OSX and older macs.
VDMX5 Legacy Releases | VIDVOX Documentation (Specifically recommended for macOS 10.12 (Sierra), macOS 10.13 (High Sierra), macOS 10.14 (Mojave)).

https://discourse.vidvox.net/t/vdmx-beta-9-9-2-0-now-ready-for-testing-m1-intel-osx-10-15/2153/2