Optimizing Visibox

This page is organized by symptom. Find what is going wrong and work down its list, cheapest fix first.

For the show-day routine rather than tuning, see Setting Up for Live Performance.

Playback stutters

Work down this list in order. The first two cost nothing and often finish the job.

1. Plug in. A laptop on battery throttles its CPU and GPU. This is the single most common cause, and the fix takes a second.
2. Quit everything else, especially a browser with many tabs, a DAW, and anything syncing files. Visibox is competing with them for the same GPU and the same disk.
3. Lower the Resolution Limit if you are driving more than one screen. Visibox renders the show once into a single picture that every display and every output samples from, and the more pixels it carries the more work each frame is. Setting the limit to 1080p costs some sharpness and usually gives the frame rate straight back.
4. Optimize your media. The Media window tells you which files are heavier than they need to be and converts them. This is the fix that lasts, and it is the slowest to apply, which is why it is fourth.
5. Move the Project to a fast local drive. See Storage below.

tip

Try the Resolution Limit before you re-encode anything. It is one click, it is reversible, and on a multi-display rig it usually helps more than anything you can do to the files.

Playback is smooth, but the picture is soft

You may have the Resolution Limit set lower than the screens need. Put it back to Automatic in Settings > Canvas and see whether the frame rate holds.

On a rig that mixes a high-resolution laptop screen with a standard projector, Sharp rendering gives the high-resolution screen its full detail, at the cost of more work per frame. It does nothing at all when every display has the same pixel density.

It was fine yesterday and it is sluggish today

Restart Visibox, then restart the computer.

This sounds like a joke and it is not. If the graphics system crashes enough times, the operating system stops using the graphics card and falls back to software for the rest of the session, which is much slower. Visibox warns you when it detects this, but if you missed the warning, a restart is the fix.

Adding media is slow

Real-time antivirus reads every file Visibox writes, which means every large video as it imports and every automatic save. Excluding the Project folder from scanning removes that delay while leaving the rest of your computer protected.

Visibox offers to do this the first time you open a Project. If you dismissed the offer, see Antivirus and file indexing.

Visibox marks its media and backup folders so Spotlight skips them, which it does on its own with no setting to find. See Antivirus and file indexing.

If you run third-party antivirus, exclude the Project folder in that product.

Importing also copies each file into the Project, so the speed of the drive you are importing from and the drive the Project lives on both matter.

Storage

Keep the Project on a fast local drive. An internal SSD is best. An external SSD over USB-C or Thunderbolt is fine.

Do not run a show from a network drive or a cloud folder. Dropbox, iCloud Drive, OneDrive, and Google Drive all sync in the background and hold files open while they do it. Any of them can replace a local file with a placeholder that has to be downloaded before it will play, which is a stutter at exactly the wrong moment. That is why Visibox tells you to copy a Project to a local drive when it finds one on a network volume.

Use cloud storage to move a Project between machines. Copy it off before you perform.

Leave room. Visibox writes as it goes: the Project on every change, a backup every few minutes, thumbnails, and any converted media. A full disk means changes stop being saved, and Visibox tells you when that happens. Do not let a show-day disk sit near full.

Keeping the Project itself lean

• Run Clean Up Unused Files… now and then. Visibox keeps a copy of replaced media so undo works, and this is how you get that space back. It cannot be undone, so do it when you are between shows rather than during one.
• Trim rather than pre-cut. In and out points play a section of a file, so one long file can serve several Clips without making several copies of it.
• Duplicate rather than re-import. Duplicating a Clip points at the same media file, so it costs no extra space. Importing the same file twice does not either, because Visibox recognizes a file it already has and reuses it.

What Visibox already does for you

Some of the work is done before you ask. Knowing it is happening explains a few things that would otherwise look odd.

• Media is prepared in the background. Playing a Clip backward, or bouncing it, or crossfading its loop, needs a prepared copy of the media. Visibox makes it in the background and the Clip plays normally in the meantime, then picks up the prepared version when it is ready.
• Files are pre-read on open. Visibox reads the start of every media file when a Project opens, so the first time you fire a Clip it is not also waiting on the disk, the antivirus, or a cloud download.
• Nothing heavy runs during a show. Background conversions hold off while anything is playing and resume when the output goes idle.
• Update checks stop while the Output, Controller or Lyrics window is full screen.
• Audio finds another route. If the audio device you chose disappears, Visibox moves the sound to another one and tells you where it went, rather than going silent.

When to suspect the machine rather than the Project

Open the Demo Project from Help > Download/Open Demo Project… and play a Clip from it. If that stutters too, the problem is the computer or its setup rather than anything in your Project, and the list at the top of this page is where to start.