NextPreviousHomeSlideshow tool problem

terrypin | 9 years ago | 11 comments | 1,960 views

I've successfully used this excellent tool several times before a year ago. But today it's not working properly. After crashes with my first 8 x 6 attempts, I rebooted my PC and restarted the tool in Firefox. I specified the first file in a test folder containing about 70 JPGs. With 4 cols and 2 rows configured it was taking about 30 s for the resultant show to open, during which 25% to 30% of CPU resource was being used. Here are a couple of screenshots:

dl.dropboxusercontent.com...

dl.dropboxusercontent.com...

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A little later I tried a 9 x 7 flat wall. That took about 1½ mins for the show to start. Worse, after stopping it playing, XP Task Mgr showed my RAM usage had jumped up to over 90% and CPU was over 30%. These values remained, with my PC naturally unresponsive, indefinitely, until I closed BT.

The show itself is being created quickly and it looks OK in my text editor. It's the opening and playing of it that is the issue.

Also, I have a lot of white images in the result:
dl.dropboxusercontent.com...

I tried it in IE in case the problem was associated with the latest FF version, but behaviour was identical.

Are there any current problems with the tool? If not, could you please advise how I might proceed to isolate the problem.



--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK




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I think it's a problem due to too big pictures, maybe you need to resize them. Big pics take time to be loaded so if you have a 9x7 slideshows that represents 63 pict layers to load.

vincent, 9 years ago


Thanks Vincent but I tried it with a set of modest sized JPGs (150 to 800 KB) with no significant difference.

And that 7x3 was shown as taking 1.6 GB of RAM. 1600 MB.

I've just created a 4x3 flat wall, BT-Slideshow-FlatWall4x3.bt

dl.dropboxusercontent.com...

After it opened and played one cycle, my TOTAL CPU usage is being shown by my tray tool CoreTemp as about 3-4%. However, as soon as I switch away from BT, for example to type this reply, that jumps dramatically to around 25-26%. In XP Task Mgr, BT (which is not even the active window, as well as not actually playing a show) is reported as using 20-21% CPU. How can that happen? BTW, it's also using a whopping 200 MB of RAM.

One clue appears after opening the file in my text editor. The FX references are all to web pages, not to my local files. Like this extract:

LAY Media
NAM "Picture row 1, col 1"
LNK ""
TP1 26
TP2 2
PHY 2
VIS Y
MPA "dir:C:\Slideshow\LowerRes\002.jpg[0]"
FXP http://www.outerspace-software.com/Gallery/Shows/Effects/ReflectiveFloor_ReflectionMap.fx
KEY

Presumably that means it's downloading that file for every layer?

I'd appreciate it if others could try the show and let me know how it behaves please.
dl.dropboxusercontent.com...

(I initially pasted that into the 'Link (URL)' box, but found that the result just opens the text file rather than playing the show. Am I making a basic error here?)

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

dl.dropboxusercontent.com...

terrypin, 9 years ago

It's not the filesize of your pictures that counts, it's their resolution.

Remember that your pictures are stored uncompressed in the video memory of your video card.

Loading a show with 63 pictures takes a lot of time.

I would not even dare to try that with pictures bigger than, say 320 x 180.

michiel, 9 years ago


Most recent slideshow under discussion was 4 x 3 = 12 pictures!

And that earlier 1600 MB and 25% CPU?

My question re file references?

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

terrypin, 9 years ago

Do you agree that the slow loading can be explained by the huge number of pictures?

I have trouble understanding your other questions.

michiel, 9 years ago


"Do you agree that the slow loading can be explained by the huge number of pictures?"

Huge?

I'd obviously expect loading time to rise as the number and size of pictures increases. But I wouldn't describe 12 or even 63 as huge! Not compared to many of the shows I've seen here.

For example, your 'Enjoy 2013' show had 936 pictures. They were very small at 180x135, but if you do the math that's nearly 10 times the overall resource of my 12-picture show using 550x367 images (which is what I called 'low res' up thread).

HOWEVER, that's now a bit academic as things have moved on. After a registry clean and yet another reboot, I'm pleased to report that I'm now getting the sort of reasonable results I expect and which I recall getting a year or so ago.

For example, going back to the 9x7 Flat Wall, with what I'd call average res pictures of 1600 x 1200, that now takes a healthy 20 s to load (i.e. start playing) and is using 340 MB of RAM. (For comparison, your 'Enjoy 2013' takes about 9 s to load here). And other tests are now giving similar realistic results - in stark contrast to those that prompted my original post!

I've still no idea what the cause of the issue was, but I'm happy to get it sorted.

--------------------
"I have trouble understanding your other questions."

One was about the file reference examples I pasted, i.e, these two lines:
MPA "dir:C:\Slideshow\LowerRes\002.jpg[0]"
FXP outerspace-software.com...

I asked whether that FXP line implied BT had to get the file from your site, for every one of the many occurrences. But after some digging (searching my HDs for files like 'P922.jpg') I'm guessing it comes from this 'cache' I've found at C:\Documents and Settings\Terry\Application Data\Outerspace Software\BluffTitler\Cache ?
It now seems a red herring, but at the time I was looking for some explanation of that excessive load time, resource usage and freezing.

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Another was about that astronomic 1600 MB of RAM. But that too can now hopefully be treated as a one-off glitch. Usage will presumably depend largely on Number of pics x (Width) X Height. So far, in my most recent tests, I've not seen more than that 340 MB I mentioned. CPU resource is still sometimes very high and I've had occasions when it didn't drop when I switched away from BT to another app, which seems odd?

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A few other questions about the Slideshow Tool please:

1. The opening (no animation) display for my tests on small arrays like 4x3 etc were smaller than I expected and low on the screen. Is that what is expected?
dl.dropboxusercontent.com...


2. To fill the window and perform animation on the whole array, do I use the Camera layer?

3. The Collage type creates a result that seems to contain about 50% single images, and the rest are 'subdivided'. Giving an overall result which I wouldn't really call a collage, such as those from Picasa for example.

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

terrypin, 9 years ago

Realize that there's nothing the slideshow tool can do that you can't do yourself manually, by adding picture layers. The show it generates is not special in any way.

To answer your questions:
1) yes
2) yes
3) we have renamed "collage" into "subdivided" as you have suggested. I hope it makes more sense now:

outerspace-software.com...

michiel, 9 years ago


Thanks Michiel, those three understood.

I'd still appreciate any comments you have on the first of those other two questions you had trouble understanding. Perhaps if you could summarise how BT processes that Fx entry in the show file? Then maybe I could understand this file reference issue better. Sorry I can't phrase it in a Yes/No fashion!


--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

terrypin, 9 years ago

The slideshow tool only generates a show file. That's all it does.

The show is treated by BluffTitler as any other show. Nothing special. The effect is downloaded from a server, which is standard technology.

Media files like effects and textures are shared, so if your show uses 2000 picture layers all using the same effect, this effect has to be downloaded only once. In the SHADERS tab of the CONTROL F1 dialog you will see a reference count (Refs) of 2000.

michiel, 9 years ago


Thanks, I think I've got it.

Q1. Does it download even once if my PC already has a local copy of any texture or effect file needed? If I pulled out my broadband connection would the show still play?

Q2. On an associated point, I've been re-playing many of my old experimental shows. Quite a few have failed because the texture (typically a photo) was moved when I made some changes to my file organisation. Some contained over a hundred layers (made using the Slideshow tool), so pressing OK or Cancel for every error message was impractical and I had to resort to the Task Mgr to close BT. Do you think it would be possible to provide some neater exit method in a future version please?

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

terrypin, 9 years ago

Q1: In the SETTINGS > INTERNET OPTIONS dialog you can set the number of days your downloaded files are kept in the cache. During this period the files are not downloaded again so you can pull out your broadband connection.

Choose FILE > SAVE SHOW + ALL MEDIA FILES if you want to store all media files on your local harddisk.

Q2: Maybe a "no longer display error messages" option can help. Thank you for your request!

michiel, 9 years ago


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