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Vision 2021 NDI Input crop


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Hello. 

 

I am setting up some LED screens in Vision. 

They are placed as graphic screens, so no regular image. 

 

Therefore i am cropping every screen from a singel input. 

It gives me arround 25 crops. 

 

When after exit it seems that vision forgets the crop. 

Is there a way to make vision store the crop for every screen, or will i need to do it on every startup? 

 

Best from Mathias 

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

I believe the ability to store the crop for every screen was added when NDI support was initially released for Vision.

 

I just ran some quick tests against Vision 2021 SP1 and it seems to be behaving as I'd expect.

I opened a test file I had lying around. Set one screen to the entire NDI stream (no crop). I set the other screen to a crop of the same NDI stream. I then positioned the camera such that both screens were easily viewable and saved the V3S.

 

This is what my screen looked like before the save:

Screen Shot 2021-01-08 at 8.22.08 AM.png

 

As my NDI server was still sending NDI data, reopening the V3S in Vision resulted in the following dialog:

Screen Shot 2021-01-08 at 8.23.14 AM.png

 

Clicking Ok, the rendering was as I'd expect and the screens "automagically" picked up what video input they should be displaying:

Screen Shot 2021-01-08 at 8.23.27 AM.png

 

FWIW, if for any reason a video input cannot be found when opening a V3S, the following dialog should display:

Screen Shot 2021-01-08 at 8.23.53 AM.png

 

I got this dialog to spawn by closing my NDI server and loading the same V3S from above. As you can see, Vision has spawned a dialog stating that it is trying to connect to the video inputs mentioned (and it will keep trying to find them "automagically" until you click cancel). If I decide to not work with NDI/Crops for now, I can click cancel. Otherwise, starting my NDI server allows Vision to find the proper NDI stream and it's associated crop. This "search" is performed live and no action is needed on your part other than starting the server that sends the output. These video inputs are then applied to the proper meshes in the scene the get the renderings I've shown above.

 

I hope this helps!

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Hello again @bbudzon

 

I have been working on the same file for some weeks now. 

Every day a make a new version, just to keep safe from making any mistakes. 

 

However a couple of days ago, I had to redo my NDI output machine, so I changed the NDI mapping. 

 

Now vision don't find the Crop for video surfases any more. 

I have redone the crop 3 times now, all the time being carefull to save. But after reboot they are gone. 

 

I get prompted with the Video inout Crop menu when loading the file, but all crops are missing. 

The old file works fine, and detects the NDI input as before. Even though I changed IP. 

 

Is this a behaviour you have seen before? 

I have 22 LED titels that I crop the input to. 

 

IMG_0527.thumb.jpeg.fd5effa6dc9664395a992170e56cabc2.jpeg

 

Here is the dialog I got from the old file, just before it recognises the input. 

IMG_0528.thumb.jpeg.cfc2007f925531e1cd431a814ca03ec1.jpeg

 

UPDATE: 

I just tried to open the old file, where NDI inputs work, and it detects all crop. Stored it as a new file on my desktop, and reloaded the file into vision. 

This made it loos all crops again. 

 

Best from Mathias 

Edited by mhersland
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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

I'm not sure I've seen this issue before but there are definitely some oddities in the screenshots above.

 

For starters, note that in the second screenshot the Video Inputs that could not be found seem to all be a Crop; more specifically Crops of NDI streams. The fact that no NDI streams are showing up as "no signal" in this list implies that Vision found the NDI Stream properly, but is somehow failing to find the Crop (which doesn't make much sense). This is also confirmed by the first screenshot, where the NDI stream is present.

 

The big red flag to me is in the first screenshot. It appears that when Vision tried to recreate the crops from the NDI stream given the information in the V3S, it somehow created a "Capture" (UVC device) instead of a "Crop". If this did somehow happen, I imagine it would result in Vision thinking the Crops are "missing".

 

I'll obviously want to try to investigate this more internally and may also ask here for additional help in finding steps to reproduce. But, for now, I'm hoping we can get you past this issue and at least provide some kind of workaround 🤞

 

First and foremost, please ensure you are always on the latest version of Vision and Vectorworks.

 

One thing you may consider trying is unplugging or disabling any UVC devices (web cams, capture cards, etc). Similarly, plugging in a UVC device may also alter the behavior in such a way that things manage to work.

 

You also stated that when opening an older file, the crops load. But, when this is saved to the desktop and opened again, the crops are missing. I'm curious if you open that file on your desktop where the crops are missing, and you recreate just two or three of the crops by hand again; what would happen if you saved this to a new location and opened that? Does it still fail to load the crops you did recreate? It may be that somehow this could "reset" the crops storing in the V3S and start working again moving forward?

 

I'm not sure if it will be possible to work around this issue or not. But, either way, I appreciate you bringing this to our attention. Hopefully we can nail down what is causing this and fix it such that others do not run into this issue in the future. Any information you may be able to provide in regards to how this may be reproduced (including whatever may be necessary to create the initial file) will be incredibly helpful!

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

If you are concerned about the forums not accepting a large file, dropbox or something may also be used.

If you are worried about keeping the project private, I believe you can attach the file to a DM. Again, if the file is too large for the forums, you could upload to dropbox or something and DM me a private link.

 

Are you able to reproduce this issue in a new unrelated test file? Perhaps, your file is not even needed. Ideally, we could reproduce this issue "from scratch".

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Hi again @bbudzon

 

I have been doing a lot of testing now. It is difficult to find any consistent reproduction of the problem. 

 

Unfortunately I haven't been able to reproduce the problem in a new file. 

When making a file with fewer crops, and the same geometry as my show file, I dont experience the problem. 

 

At a time I had the idea, that it had to doo with how many network cards / inputs were active in the machine. 

As I use: 

One for Art-Net from the console. 

One for NDI from my media server. 

One for Internet, to keep dropbox backup. 

 

When disabling so only one card was receiving data, it seamed more stable, and loaded the file. 

But after enabling the other two, and reloading the file it started to not recognise the crop again. 

 

However this was no problem in my "smal" test file. 

 

Right now I am unsure how to move on. Maybe I can share my file with you to test? 

 

In addition i experience Vision to crash, almost every time I open a file. 

When it loads "Dynamic Cache" it goes to around 12% and closes. 

This made me open it in "Safe Mode" which lets me open the file, and afterwords adjust Preferences. 

I am running on a Windows 10 Pro with an older Intel Core i7-7700, 32GB RAM, and a Nvidia 1080 Graphics card. But the activity monitor dont show any sign of the machine being stressed when opening. It lays around 30-40% on GPU, and 20% On CPU

 

The crashing started after adding the Screen inputs. 

 

Best from Mathias 

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

This is all very good information! You may very well be on to something with this only happening in files with many many crops. I'm not sure how well this scenario has been tested and your file would be greatly appreciated! Post here or DM me. It may help us narrow things down better, especially if your files exhibits the issue on our machines in-house.

 

I do not have too many more suggestions as to how you may proceed with this many crops. One idea might be to try lowering a lot of your application document settings. Perhaps if we free up some resources it will help, although it unfortunately does not seem likely.

 

I just realized... it might be interesting to see how 20 crops of 1 NDI stream (1:20) behaves differently than 20 crops of 10 NDI streams (1:2). Perhaps, if there are not so many crops for a single input, it will work better?? 🤞

 

In regards to the crashing, this may very well be tied to the file being large and your settings being too high. Specifically, your GPU being ~30-40% and CPU ~20% only indicates how much work they are doing. It does not indicate how much RAM is available/free. If the GPU runs out of VRAM, it would crash the program using the most VRAM, which in this case would be Vision. So, since we are concerned with the GPU primarily, while it is good that it is not pegged at 100% work, it may be that you have run out of VRAM given the size of the scene.

 

One of the biggest VRAM consumers is shadows. Disabling them (or at the very least lowering the shadow quality) will lower VRAM requirements. Similarly, lowering the Resolution Quality will reduce VRAM requirements. You can try running at Texture Quality Medium/Low, as those also use less VRAM than their higher counterparts.

 

My very general suggestion when it comes to tweaking performance/quality settings is to start with lower qualities (read; higher performance) and add in more quality where you find it is possible.

 

Again, hope this all helps and very sorry that your experiencing these issues!

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Thanks again for your reply. 

It helps a lot with a friend 🙂

 

My work around is to crop all screens after reboot, which is a little time consuming, but manageable. 

 

I have send you my files. 

It will be interesting to se if you experience the same. When testing, remember to make individual crops for every screen. 

 

I just tried to map all screens to the same crop. 

After a restart Vision recognised the crop! So you might be on to something here!  🥳

I will try to map my screens to fewer crops, and see if I can find the limit. 

 

 

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I just found that all the crops somehow is stored in the file. 

After right clicking a screen, and choosing "Reset Video Input" I get the whole list of crop's. 

So somehow they are still a part of the file. I attached a screen shot. 

 

This at least makes start up a lot easier :) 

 

Best from Mathias 

 

01.thumb.jpg.d54701615240eb0bc10b65ec4efc660f.jpg

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Ohh! One thing I totally forgot to mention (as it's kind of a "hidden" by designed feature, imo) is there is a menu command under Render called Reset Video Inputs.

 

When a file loads normally and successfully, this menu command spawns a dialog which prompts you to select a video input texture for which you would like to choose a new video input source.

 

However, when we fail to find video inputs at load time, this menu command "re-triggers" the events that would normally happen at file load time, in regards to the loading of inputs! So, you may have stumbled into that code somehow. My guess was that the crops were properly written to the file, but we were just failing to recreate them somehow. Failing to remember this somewhat "hidden" feature, I hadn't considered that running the "Reset Video Inputs" dialog *may* get things to work (no promises hahahh).

 

Either way, I seem to have gotten your DM. I'll try to find some time to look at it and hope that this information has helped.

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