R7 jerky video playback

[patricksweeney]

Recently, when I shoot video on my R7 (using the EFS15-85 lens, my workhorse) I can't get the video to play back properly.,

In-camera I can see the video smoothly streaming, looking at the back screen. But when I play it in DPP4, it jerks, jumping 25-30 frames at a time.

It plays smoothly in the default Windows video player.

Nothing helps, not selecting 4K or FHD, frame rates or switching IPB to IPB light (or whatever it is). Turning off the lens stabilization doesn't help, either.

[p4pictures]

Do you have HDR PQ enabled? With HDR PQ enabled the video is encoded with the H.265 compression, and this takes a lot of power to play back even on a powerful machine. The camera has a hardware encoder/decoder so it plays back and records such movies perfectly. However on many computers the power of the graphics card is an important factor to be able to play back footage smoothly. 

DPP is not the best tool for playback of videos to be honest. 

[stevet1]

Patrick,

If you haven't tried VLC,  you might give it a whirl.

It's free, and I've found it very useful.

Steve Thomas

[Waddizzle]

I didn’t know DPP could play video. When did they change it?  The name says it all, Digital Photo Professional.

[patricksweeney]

I've been using DPP4 for a few years now, grabbing frames out of the video to use as stills. It was even working for a while on the R7 video, until I tried doing some manual settings for video, and then things got sketchy. I'll have to look for the HDR PQ setting and see what's up. I've got VLC, I guess I can try that as a backup.

[wq9nsc]

I agree with Brian that it is going to vary by the computer you are using.  DPP has never been an efficient user of computer resources and video makes that even more obvious.  DPP has worked fine for reviewing all video (regardless of format) using my HP Z-8 desktop but when I use my little HP Z series laptop I bought for travel, I get the jerky motion in DPP.  The difference is the desktop has a pair of 28 core Intel Xeon CPUs and a pair of Nvidia workstation Ada series video cards while the little laptop has an Intel 7 series with 16 cores several of which are reduced performance cores and it has an intro level ADA series Nvidia video adapter since the laptop balances performance with size and power consumption.

Either work fine playing video using VLC (my preferred video playback and also recommended in this thread by Stevet1) but DPP isn't smooth except on the higher end hardware.  If you hit ctrl alt del to launch task manager while using DPP to play video, it may reveal the contributing factors by looking at utilization of the CPU and memory but the only thing task manager displays for the video card is GPU utilization which is another area where DPP fails in implementation.  If your PC has a minimal or integrated Intel video adapter, then it is likely sharing system memory with the video adapter and that really hurts video performance.

Rodger

[patricksweeney]

I think I follow that, but the video playback worked just fine with the R7 until recently, and my hardware hasn't changed.

[patricksweeney]

OK, HDR PQ is not enabled. What I get is a screen with "Not available because of the associated function's setting. Clarity"

OK, what the heck does that mean?

[patricksweeney]

I jumped into VLC, and remembered how awkward the menus are. But I can play the video smoothly, and I can grab stills. Curiously, while you can get it to advance frame-by-frame you can't get VLC to back up a frame. So I have a work-around until I can figure out why the old method doesn't work.