Multi-thread preload

[Sbrusse]

Hi,
When I load a exr sequence or a whatever animation, it loads up in ram using 1 cpu.
It can often take few minutes to load up a sequence and it's kind of discouraging to use pdplayer to open files because of that.

Would it be possible that the pre-load would be multi threaded?
Not sur about video files, but surely this should be ok to implement when dealing with animated images sequence files.

I think it's pretty reasonable to say that the average computer now has more than 1 core.

Thanks
Stan

[Svetlozar Draganov]

For the EXR actually PDPlayer uses the internal multi-threading of the OpenEXR library so we don't have much of a control about it.
What is technically possible to be done is to load different frames using different CPU threads but this is not so easy to implement.

[Sbrusse]

That was exactly what I was thinking of yes
It would greatly improve the workflow

PDplayer know when he loads how much frames there are, is it not just a question on dividing the number of frames by the number of cores available (or even a settings somewhere) and each load every x number of frames with a offset?

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Yeap, it sounds easy on theory but it is not that easy to develop.
We'll see what we could do about that.

[Sbrusse]

Great, thanks a lot
Dealing with high fps 4k or higher ress animations make it grind to a halt

Cheers

[Sbrusse]

Hey, any news about this?

Thanks

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Yes we just did a version with multi-thread preload but the results are not so great according to our tests.
We did 4 tests on 2 different machines on both SSD and HDD drives. On SSD drives on both machines the multi-threaded version is about 10% faster.
On HDD drives we got some conflicting results, one of the drives (the newer one) was again 10% faster with the new version, the other one however was about 100% slower.

If you are interest to test that version please drop us a email at support@chaosgroup.com include my name in the subject (in attention of svetlozar draganov) and a link to this thread and I'll send it to you.