Hi!
Recently I’ve been experimenting with different ways to play multiple high-res videos simultaneously in UE5.1 for car LED shoots using nDisplay & multi-user.
What I’ve found from my experiments is as follows:
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My experience with the new Media Plate actor is terrible. It seems to be fundamentally broken, playback either stutters or pauses (seemingly) randomly and refuses to work again. It is useless in multi-user sessions - its playback controls simply do not register as changes and don’t trigger updates on the render nodes. The only thing it is useful for is allowing video playback control via Sequencer.
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h.264 Is a stable codec to use, Sequencer integration is easy, but often desyncs and lags. Closing/reopening the sequencer seems to solve most of the desync, until it happens again. Sequencer settings on async evaluation and blocking frames had little effect on playback accuracy
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h.265 is awesome, but unusable for its unreliability. Despite it being usable in an .mp4 container, the sequencer has SERIOUS issues with playing/pausing the content. Playback is stellar up to two plates. With three plates, the GPU seems to struggle with how it should allocate its resources and just stops doing what it should. Setting the framerate to be fixed at 2x the playback rate seems to give it a good shake and improves performance massively.
The sequencer still hates it though, ruining any hopes of controlling plate playback in a professional setting. -
EXRs are cool, but terribly unpractical. Let’s be realistic, during a shoot quick iteration and modifications are vital. Having a minute-long plate be nearly a 100gigs in size throws a wrench at any hopes of quick iteration me and the team might have. Clients want to pick and choose between plates fast. Our most recent project had HOURS of footage for a car led bg. It would be unthinkable to do this with EXRs.
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ProRes had similar performance to h.265, but even less stable. UE seemingly does not like the .mov container.
The WMF plugin settings are ineffective.
Now I still want to test Notch .avi, HAP and streamed playbacks via a blackmagic capture card. But neither of these solutions is really practical.
What is fascinating to me is that the poor performance on the playback of h.265 plates seems to be exclusively tied to some kind of glitch in the Sequencer! If this were to be investigated and resolved, we’d have a wonderful new resource to control h.265 plates in UE! That’d be a fantastic step-up!
I’d also love to hear your personal experiences with similar workflows and suggestions as to how avoid/eliminate the playback issues I’ve been having.