Sequense Editor delay

[Gregg Hess]

I upgraded to 2.4.8 and I noticed a deley in the sequense editor. I notice a 1 to 4 second delay after playing the visible screen before the screen becomes active again. I am using an old PC, 640 mghz, 128m ram and Windows 2000.

[Richard Hamilton]

Gregg Hess wrote:

I upgraded to 2.4.8 and I noticed a deley in the sequense editor. I notice a 1 to 4 second delay after playing the visible screen before the screen becomes active again. I am using an old PC, 640 mghz, 128m ram and Windows 2000.

I don't necessarily think this is the problem, but I am surprised to hear that you can even run W2K on a 128MB computer, much less run an application. :?

[Denny]

It barely meets the minimum system requirements listed in the FAQs, but I would still suspect the PC. I don't think LOR has updated the system requirements in quite a while, since the original LOR was released, as they indicate the program will work with Windows 98 too, which is incorrect.

What are the minimum PC requirements?
400 MHz or faster CPU

Windows 98, 98SE, ME, 2000 or XP

20 MB free disk space

128 MB RAM

[Gregg Hess]

Yes, this is a baby PC and I normally do not use it for creating sequences. This PC has been dedicated to the LOR light show. I've never had a problem running the show with it in the past and it's nice to have a PC dedicated to the show. No worries about someone using it during the show. I re-initialized it 2 years ago with Windows 2000 and LOR, nothing else. But since I noticed this delay in the sequence editor I was wondering if this PC would work for running the show this year.



I have a newer PC, 2.3 ghz quad core with 4m cache on the processor and 6gb of RAM. I use it for video editing. I'll test LOR on this tonight.

[Richard Hamilton]

Hey Gregg,

After seeing Denny's comment, another few thoughts came to mind... other reasons why it might be the PC:

I recently updated and embedded the Windows Media Player files into an application for a client. One thing I noticed since the last time I did it a year ago was that the size of the files grew substantially. WMP is a slug with lots of baggage!

Example, the WMP.dll is 10 MB just by itself and that does not include the support files. If you allowed Windows to perform its regular updates and a new version of WMP came down with it, then at least 14 MB (by comparing old files to new ones) of additional memory would now be required when it runs. When you add this to other 3rd party support files and LOR program files, it might be enough to use all of the available memory and start doing some serious disk caching when LOR runs.

Disk caching due to low memory is almost always the reasons for delays and "jerky" response in applications. As you probably know, programs never get smaller!

If you are really wanting to keep the computer for this purpose, perhaps take a look inside and see if there is a spare slot to add more memory to the board, or consider taking out the memory in there now and replacing with a larger chip board if no spare slots are available. Check with your computer manufacturer about this because there are many sizes of board with various configurations. If the computer is not too old, then you may be able to still find memory chip boards for it at a local electronics or computer retailer.

So I am guessing you probably have just enough processing power, but your amount of available low memory is causing the problem.

[Richard Hamilton]

Gregg Hess wrote:

I have a newer PC, 2.3 ghz quad core with 4m cache on the processor and 6gb of RAM. I use it for video editing. I'll test LOR on this tonight.

Just an observation here about your 6GB of RAM. If you are running a 32-bit version of Windows then 4GB is all that Windows is going to access and use. Thus, I presume you have a 64-bit version?

[Gregg Hess]

Yes, I am running Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 Home Premium 64-bit Edition on the newer PC. But I am not real happy with vista. Adobe Premiere Elements can suck this machine dry.

LOR has always run fine with minimal resources. I work in IT and I get to see what developers create these days. Memory is never on their mind. I've been impressed with LOR because they must take into consideration the amount of resources their product uses.

My old PC has room for more memory and it was available a year ago. I will look into this.

[Gregg Hess]

No time last night to install LOR on my new PC yet. Maybe tonight.

When I installed LOR 2.4.8 on my PC that is dedicated to LOR it gave me a warning message that MSIMG32.dll could not be updated. It stated that I might need to update my operating system. I used the Windows update program and applied every update available. This took many sessions to get all the updates but I got all of them. Then I reinstalled LOR but I still got the same error message.

Could this be part of my problem?

[Richard Hamilton]

Greg, this is something that probably only LOR can answer for you since they know what they are trying to install or update with their setup program.

Although this file is a Windows GDI (graphics device interface) component, I speculate that you are dealing with two different problems. I still think that memory is the reason for teh delayu, but obviously you need to solve this other problem first.

Are you sure that you restarted Windows (not just log out and log back in) before you tried installing LOR? The reason is because updating this GDI component requires a restart of Windows.

Maybe it is time you tagged the LOR support people on this one.

[Gregg Hess]

Step 1)

I add 128gb for a total of 256gb memory to the old pc. I did not notice any difference. I still had a delay after playing the visible screen. This does not happen until I repeat the screen about 4 or 5 times. I notice this the most on a sequence that is setup for 96 channels. It does not do it on the sequence for 80 channels.

My bet is I am approaching the limit of the old PC but I believe it will still work to run the show.

Step 2)

I installed LOR on my new PC. The new PC, quad core 2.33 ghz with 6gb memory does not have the problem. The sequence editor does some funky things at the end of the "Play Visible Screen" but I do not notice any delay.

As for the msimg32 issue, I turned that over to support.

Thanks to all for your help.

[George Simmons]

Gregg,

Do you have any lights connected or are you just using the visualizer? The reason I ask is because I've had some wierd things happening with connected light sets while using the play visible screen option. I, too, have regularly noticed what you describe and have attributed it to being a software quirk. But after reading your posts, I'm wondering if it might be a resource issue.

[Gregg Hess]

George,

No lights or controller connected. Just the LOR II software. I am not using the animation either.

I am just getting started this year. When I create a sequence I usually work on a single screen. I play it over and over until I get the timings how I want them. The new LOR editor (2.4.10) appears to play for about 1/2 to 1 second past the visible screen and then it places the timeline somewhere on the screen. I believe it went back to the begining of the screen in the past. It's almost like the size of the screen is not 100% in sync with the "Play Visible Screen".

In all, I like 2.4.10 but it might need some fine tuning. I have a lot to learn. It looks like we got a lot of new options that I don't know how to use yet.