Hello,
Some colleagues and I had the need of adding lots of actors to our animations. We followed the instructions provided in the Fundamentals training which was to create popVideos of actors and then add several of those to a project. We found that sometimes this worked great, and sometimes it made the animation nearly impossible to work with as it would slow down iclone playback by about 90%.
A few of us figured it must be our hardware, so upgraded to the newest generation intel i7 cpus and the Nvidia GTX 10 series graphics card along with Solid State hard drives and extra ram, etc, but this did NOT cure the problem.
We finally pinpointed the problem today and it's reproducible on iClone 6.53 and iClone 7 Pre-Release on multiple computers.
Here's the problem: Drop a popVideo into your scene beyond frame 1 (it's easier to see the problem if you move to about 400), and when you playback in iClone, the playback on a high-end animation computer plays at about 6fps in the frames prior to where the popvideo starts playing, and once it starts playing, it jumps up to 60fps and plays perfectly. If you are watching the timeline while this is going on, you'll see the scrub position marker sticking and jumping every little bit before the popvideo starts playing, then it runs smooth once it does start playing.
If you then move the popvideo to frame one (and even loop it multiple times if you want) it will play at 60fps all the way through, no problem.
So far our work-around is to loop it, turn the visibility off, and bring it back on in the scene at the position you need it. Big problem with this is that since you can't change the speed of the popvideo in the timeline, it may not loop at the position you need it (for example, you need it to play at frame 600 and you have a 500 frame popvideo... the loop would happen at 500 and 1000, but not at 600 where you need it to play).
Note that this happens no matter what the popvideo is placed on (image layer, billboard, plane, etc.)
Note that this happens with all popvideos no matter how big or small the file size or length.
Note that this problem occurs even if you deactivate the plane/billboard.Note that if you do the same thing with an MP4 of the exact same video, then it only slows down about 10% instead of 90%.
Hopefully a resolution can be found quickly!
Thank You!
Denny