Loading movie?

[SuitcaseOfLizards]

Ok, this 'feature' doesn't work for me.

I have a public domain silent version of Alice in Wonderland I'd like to score. It came as a basic MP4, H.264 compression, nothing fancy, I used Handbrake to re-scale it to 320x240 since I don't need the full size to see where I am, and make it easier for Waveform to deal with.

To cut to the chase: Waveform 8 shows it as an option. I select it and Waveform says 'no movie'.. oh, nice. Windows Media Player plays it. Handbrake recognizes it. Hitfilm will happily work with it. Waveform seems unable to deal with it (no idea why the option exists if it doesn't work).

Is there a recommended format that is known good? Or am I just wishful thinking?

Sorry for the tone but I've spent the entire weekend trying to get this to work. I love Waveform and would like to not have hit the wall here...

All help appreciated.

[GuitarPlayerinNYC]

This was a feature in Tracktion. I've been wanting to do this since forever, and I just bought WF 10.

In any case, I've massively googled this, and saw ONE success story. The user loaded codecs he found someplace, and it seemed to work for him. Unfortunately, I didn't bookmark it, but I think the answer is in this forum.

Maybe change your search queries to "Tracktion" instead of Waveform?

I do recall a user saying an .avi file works. I personally haven't tried this.

I can't help but think that Tracktion/Waveorm isn't designed to handle both audio and video. I have some VSTs that will suck up 100% of the cpu resources, and I have the latest i7 8 core chip, with 16 gigs of ram.

I'm thinking the only affordable (<$200) solution would be to get a video editor where you can simply overlay the audio over the video, but I can see tracking both as being problematic. There's free video programs I've been looking into for this.

[GuitarPlayerinNYC]

Think I found the post about the codecs: viewtopic.php?t=483830

See last post. For Windows only.

[SuitcaseOfLizards]

I tried an uncompressed AVI with no fancy anything, it loaded for Waveform silently crashed to the desktop after 3 seconds of playback. Lovely.

I have a solution (Acid Pro 9 loads and plays any WVA/AVI I have) but I'll give Waveform one last go with the docec suggestion above. Thanks for posting that!

[SuitcaseOfLizards]

Ok, installed the codec pack, rebooted.. loaded the MP4, it showed up in the video window but no playback.

Closed Waveform, loaded a different video. Video window showed up, hit PLAY.. instant silent crash to desktop.

Reopened Waveform, loaded uncompressed AVI, hit PLAY.. BOOM! Silent crash to desktop.

I'm not paid to beta test Waveform 'features'. Obviously this hasn't been well-exercised on Windows 10, at least. FFS all I want to do is add music to a video for Youtube!

Been here since T3.. it's been a long trip, created a ton of music, but I've hit a total dead end with Waveform. I'll use Acid Pro until I can afford Digital Performer for Windows (US$500, ouch!). Beats Blow Tools, though.

Happy Tracktioning for everyone else, best of luck to Tracktion for the future, but this is my stop so I'll be leaving.

[Rock]

The Waveform/Tracktion Video system is poor at best. Work arounds... Your millage may vary.
--------------------------------------------------------------
VST OPTIONS

http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/videoplayer.html

https://www.kvraudio.com/developer_chal ... deoVST.zip

https://web.archive.org/web/20060615233 ... er05pc.zip

https://vidplayvst.com/index.htm
---------------------------------------------------------------
External App that can sync with MIDI time code coming out of waveform/tracktion:
https://www.vidplaymtc.com/index.htm

You'll also need a MIDI loopback system. I recommend...
https://www.tobias-erichsen.de/software/loopmidi.html

--------------------------------------------------------------

Good luck.

[Steve Bolivar]

From the recent NAMM show there is a Sonic State video from the Tracktion booth and they said it was being targeted to stereo audio creation, not audio for video, not surround... trying to keep it very niche focused. Seems like you're right to move on to another tool for audio to video scoring. The Alice in Wonderland project sounds cool though.

[GuitarPlayerinNYC]

I think Traction should simply take video out as a feature, since I've literally seen only 1 or 2 "success" stories.

There's a number of free audio/video programs. I used this to sync audio of myself riffing on a guitar to a backing track recorded in Traction, to video I recorded: https://www.nchsoftware.com/videopad/in ... gLP5PD_BwE You'll be nagged to pay for some bells and whistles, but you can continue to use it free, if you don't want to add visual effects.

In fairness to Traction, I've been using their stuff for free, since T4. It serves its intended purpose well (for me). I can do a helluva lot with WF 10 Basic. $119 isn't a bad price, imo.

I think Traction may be moving slowly towards the Ableton market, for live sessions. I think video is just an afterthought. I've read of people using 2 or more different DAWs, because no one DAW does everything.

[GuitarPlayerinNYC]

The Waveform/Tracktion Video system is poor at best. Work arounds... Your millage may vary.
--------------------------------------------------------------
VST OPTIONS

http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/videoplayer.html

https://vidplayvst.com/index.htm
---------------------------------------------------------------

Good luck.

I tried the first one, and the instructions were pretty bare. I first copied the entire contents of the extracted files to my VST folder. Waveform picked up, and a video window with "Polac" opened up. But I couldn't seem to load a vid. I also clicked the two .exe files, thinking they may have been installers, but no go.

I then copied only the mediavst.x64 dll file to my VST folder, but no go there. I deleted it, but "polac" still appeared in my plugin menu. To get rid of that (on a hunch, so do so at your risk): I went to C:>User>AppData>Local, and deleted two folders that had to do with Polac. It disappeared from my plugin menu.

The 2nd one looked promising, being a single .dll, so I copied that to my VST folder. Didn't see it in my plugin menu. Maybe I should have rebooted.

Guess it's back to the NCH program, for simple syncing audio to video. I was hoping for something where you could input audio, while watching a video (for cinematic scoring type stuff), but that's being too optimistic, imo.

Thanks for the links.

[Kott]

The 2nd one looked promising, being a single .dll, so I copied that to my VST folder. Didn't see it in my plugin menu. Maybe I should have rebooted.

no need to reboot, it appears well after rescan
do you take a 64-bit dll?

[GuitarPlayerinNYC]

The 2nd one looked promising, being a single .dll, so I copied that to my VST folder. Didn't see it in my plugin menu. Maybe I should have rebooted.

no need to reboot, it appears well after rescan
do you take a 64-bit dll?

Yeah, and I validated it. It was good. It just didn't appear in my plugin menu. Maybe I'll give it another shot later, but I've spent more time than I care to think about, to get Tracktion to play a vid. This question has been posed for years now, and I don't think Traction has really chimed in on how to get it to work.

This may be simpler, depending on need. I'm tired of spending hundreds of hours to get shit to work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PiN9Zgt_Kg

[GuitarPlayerinNYC]

The 2nd one looked promising, being a single .dll, so I copied that to my VST folder. Didn't see it in my plugin menu. Maybe I should have rebooted.

no need to reboot, it appears well after rescan
do you take a 64-bit dll?

Hey, I reread the instructions, and it said to place the "64-bit host DAW: copy /Microsoft-Windows/64-bit/VidPlayVSTv2.dll to your plugin folder." Previously, I put the .dll to my main VST folder. This go 'round, I put the .dll in the Wavorm folder, where the .exe files are.

It now appears in my plugin menu as "AnthonySJacques" and I was able to load an .mp4. It played, and I was able to mute the audio.

I have to read the rest of the instructions, but thanks! If it works, I'll spring for the $18, I think they were asking.

[Rock]

https://www.vidplaymtc.com/index.htm



This is the one I use and it actually worked pretty well for me, but I didn't want to go through explaining MIDI loopbacks and MTC unless I really had too. It's an separate app, so you have to have Waveform send it MIDI Time Code.

First Install loopMIDI which is an all around fantastic, stable and useful tool anyway.

https://www.tobias-erichsen.de/software/loopmidi.html

It will give you the ability to create new virtual MIDI ports on the fly. Once installed, create a new virtual MIDI port and call it "MTC".

In Waveform's Setup tab, go to MIDI. Set MTC as an active OUTPUT in Waveform. Do not set it as an active INPUT. It should remain inactive in the INPUT section!

Install VidPlayMTC. In the apps configuration menu set it's MIDI input to MTC. Set the audio as suits. Load the video of your choice. Waveform should now control the playback of the App.

[metamorphosis]

Generally-speaking, MP4 and anything using h264/h265 are extremely poor choices for non-linear editing or playback.
Simply-put, jumping backward in the video involves huge amounts of CPU compared to going forward linearly.
Simple, easy-to-decode formats such as cinepak (.avi) are easy to use in these capacities (for preview purposes only of course, not for video editing). Others such as mpeg2/mpeg1 also work well in this capacity.

[ASJPlugins]

Generally-speaking, MP4 and anything using h264/h265 are extremely poor choices for non-linear editing or playback.
Simply-put, jumping backward in the video involves huge amounts of CPU compared to going forward linearly.
Simple, easy-to-decode formats such as cinepak (.avi) are easy to use in these capacities (for preview purposes only of course, not for video editing). Others such as mpeg2/mpeg1 also work well in this capacity.

Yes, video playback looks simple. I don't think many people understand what is going on under the hood. If you try to keep in memory many seconds worth of complete video frames, pretty soon you start to run out of memory. So video is stored compressed on disk and uncompressed on the fly to present it on screen. There are hundreds of different compression strategies but I believe they all make use of 'key frames'. A key frame is one complete video image with all the pixels present. The following frames store only those pixels which are different from the previous key frame. Key frames are normally about 1 second apart but I have seen 4 second key frame interval on old .wmv videos. All frames between the key frames are incomplete images.

Playback is simple if you just play forward from the start of the video, but in a DAW the user wants to jump backwards and forwards. If the programmer writes code that simply seeks to the frame nearest to the current timeline offset then that is likely to be an incomplete frame, which just looks like garbage. A simplistic approach would be to seek to the nearest previous key frame but the timestamp of that frame could be a second or more in advance of the timeline offset. So, for accurate sync in a DAW the programmer needs to write code with a strategy to seek correctly. It is not rocket science, but it took me a while to work out how to do it for my VidPlayVST plugin (mentioned above). VidPlayMTC (also mentioned above) uses a version of the same plugin.