High RAM Usage with Video Simpler
When dropping a video clip into Video Simpler, Videosync pre-loads frames into memory to ensure instant playback when triggered by MIDI. This is necessary because many video codecs (like H.264) use inter-frame compression, where frames depend on other frames for decoding. Real-time decompression would introduce latency that's unacceptable for live performance.
However, decompressed frames require significantly more memory than the original compressed file, especially with long or high-resolution videos. This can lead to very high RAM usage and potential system instability if not enough RAM is available.
Mitigation
- Be selective about the frames you load into Video Simpler. By default, Video Simpler loads only the first 100 frames of a video into memory, making it a more deliberate choice for the user to load more frames and increase RAM consumption.
- Use Video Simpler primarily for short-duration clips that need to be triggered by MIDI. For anything else, place video clips onto Audio tracks in Session View or Arrangement View, as this does not consume any RAM.
- Use lower-resolution videos when possible, as this can greatly reduce the amount of memory required for decompression.
- As a last resort, consider converting your videos to use the HAP codec.
HAP vs Non-HAP Codecs
If it is absolutely necessary to use many/longer/higher-resolution videos with Video Simpler, only then we would recommend using the HAP codec, which is specifically designed for real-time playback and minimizes pre-loading requirements. HAP-encoded videos can be streamed directly from disk without needing to fully decompress them into memory first, significantly reducing RAM usage.
There are however a couple of downsides to using HAP to be aware of:
- Larger file sizes on disk compared to more compressed codecs like H.264.
- Not a natively supported codec on operating systems, so additional software may be required to play them outside of Videosync (e.g. VLC Media Player).
- HAP encoded videos are only supported by Videosync on macOS, and not on Windows.
How much RAM memory is needed?
You can roughly calculate how much memory is needed for a decompressed video by using the following calculator: