Out of Memory
Moderators: simonB, nick, TomHat, florent, Ben
Out of Memory
I'm having a heck of a time programming a set of gradient sequences. I keep getting an "out of memory" error that seems to be related to the length of time I set for my scenes. I need 4 separate gradient scenes that each fade through several colors over about 11 hours. This is apparently not possible no matter how I try to make it work. I tried to make several shorter linked scenes to constitute a some single 11 hour cue but as soon as I have more than about 20 hours of scenes programmed I get this error and the program crashes.
Re: Out of Memory
After quite a bit of testing on my end and from the reseller my client bought their controller from, we've determined that this is a serious bug with using gradients. Using gradient scenes creates excessive file sizes and out of memory errors.
Re: Out of Memory
Hi there,
An 11 hour gradient is going to use a lot of memory as it's creating a huge amount of steps to produce the effect. After testing I found it worked okay for me with no memory errors but this maybe because I have a computer with lots of processing power and ram.
My advice would be to create a scene with static colours inside with a fade between each different colour. I have included am example showfile for your reference.
Hope that helps.
An 11 hour gradient is going to use a lot of memory as it's creating a huge amount of steps to produce the effect. After testing I found it worked okay for me with no memory errors but this maybe because I have a computer with lots of processing power and ram.
My advice would be to create a scene with static colours inside with a fade between each different colour. I have included am example showfile for your reference.
Hope that helps.
- Attachments
-
- Gradients using Static & Fade.arc
- (24.6 KiB) Downloaded 599 times
Benno
--
Product Support
--
Product Support
Re: Out of Memory
Thanks Ben for your reply.
We have done quite a bit more extensive testing including having the reseller send a technician to our project site to help.
While you may have gotten one scene with a gradient to work on your computer, we have 4. I too had no problem getting up to 2-3 of these scenes to work. The 4th one pushed us over the edge. We used two different computers that should have been plenty powerful. This is unfortunate as the gradient tool is really such as great way of doing color transitions and makes it very easy. Hopefully this is resolved in the near future.
The next thing we tried is exactly what you are suggesting where we created a scene that had all the different colors as static colors with a fade time between each one. While this solved the out of memory error in the software we were unsuccessful in getting these uploaded into the controller (DE3). It would take a very long time to upload and eventually fail. We tried several memory cards of different sizes too. Every memory card worked fine with a simple test file but failed with the real program file. We tried uploading by using both the USB connection and directly onto the SD card for each card we had and nothing worked. We suspect that it was again a memory or processing power issue but in the controller. If we deleted all but 1 of the scenes it would upload okay. This was also true for the gradient programs. If we only had one of those gradients scenes in the file we were able to upload it but more would make it fail even it worked on the computer with 2 or 3 scenes. This leads us to believe that independent of what was possible in the software, when it uploaded it to the controller it was rendering the file in a different way than how the software deals with it. I suspect that it's because the fade times are rendered as multiple steps of the same duration in the scene and not something that the controller does live. So the longer the fade the more steps of the same small duration are created. Quite inefficient.
The resolution was to create a separate scene for each color and link the scenes with the appropriate fade time between them. This worked because even though we had as long as an hour or more fade time between scenes I think it now shifts the timing to the controller to do live by simply cross fading between two colors rather than many small steps within the individual scenes to make a smooth transition. This in the end is not really a desirable solution as it creates too many scenes on the controller and is confusing to the user. Not to mention you loose some of the great features offered by the other methods such as the gradient.
My client was not happy in the end with the result of having so many scenes to sort through not to mention having to spend extra time and money to get this to work. It didn't make us look very good either. I hope you guys figure out a way to resolve these issues as we otherwise like this product. Until that happens my company has unfortunately made the decision to not specify this product any more.
Thanks for your hep Ben.
Greg
We have done quite a bit more extensive testing including having the reseller send a technician to our project site to help.
While you may have gotten one scene with a gradient to work on your computer, we have 4. I too had no problem getting up to 2-3 of these scenes to work. The 4th one pushed us over the edge. We used two different computers that should have been plenty powerful. This is unfortunate as the gradient tool is really such as great way of doing color transitions and makes it very easy. Hopefully this is resolved in the near future.
The next thing we tried is exactly what you are suggesting where we created a scene that had all the different colors as static colors with a fade time between each one. While this solved the out of memory error in the software we were unsuccessful in getting these uploaded into the controller (DE3). It would take a very long time to upload and eventually fail. We tried several memory cards of different sizes too. Every memory card worked fine with a simple test file but failed with the real program file. We tried uploading by using both the USB connection and directly onto the SD card for each card we had and nothing worked. We suspect that it was again a memory or processing power issue but in the controller. If we deleted all but 1 of the scenes it would upload okay. This was also true for the gradient programs. If we only had one of those gradients scenes in the file we were able to upload it but more would make it fail even it worked on the computer with 2 or 3 scenes. This leads us to believe that independent of what was possible in the software, when it uploaded it to the controller it was rendering the file in a different way than how the software deals with it. I suspect that it's because the fade times are rendered as multiple steps of the same duration in the scene and not something that the controller does live. So the longer the fade the more steps of the same small duration are created. Quite inefficient.
The resolution was to create a separate scene for each color and link the scenes with the appropriate fade time between them. This worked because even though we had as long as an hour or more fade time between scenes I think it now shifts the timing to the controller to do live by simply cross fading between two colors rather than many small steps within the individual scenes to make a smooth transition. This in the end is not really a desirable solution as it creates too many scenes on the controller and is confusing to the user. Not to mention you loose some of the great features offered by the other methods such as the gradient.
My client was not happy in the end with the result of having so many scenes to sort through not to mention having to spend extra time and money to get this to work. It didn't make us look very good either. I hope you guys figure out a way to resolve these issues as we otherwise like this product. Until that happens my company has unfortunately made the decision to not specify this product any more.
Thanks for your hep Ben.
Greg