50 Video Simplers VS. 50 videos

Videosync
1

Performance-wise: How much worse is it to have a drum rack containing 50 Video Simpler instances in comparison to having just 50 videos as clips in Ableton?

I was considering playing back all my videos from Video Simplers instead of clips. Hoping the Video Simplers wouldn’t demand a lot of performance for as long as they’re not playing back anything. But looking at my GPU monitoring that doesn’t seem to be the case.

What I wanna do:

  • play back up to 3 videos at the same time
  • having a large pool of videos to potentially play back
  • change videos in rhythmical (at times very fast) patterns
2

Hey Philip! There is a big difference in using Video Simpler versus Audio Tracks to play back video clips, especially videos that are encoded with codecs other than HAP, as those are all loaded into (V)RAM (HAP being the exception). You will very quickly run out of available RAM as all videos are decompressed before loaded in it, and this will impact performance.

I highly recommend reading this Troubleshooting article that covers this subject in detail.

Let me know if you have any additional questions after that!