Try zooming out on the waveform. (use + and - keys on your keyboard)

Also try increasing your maximum screen updates. (set-up / display)

Make sure your files are analyzed, remove the bad or corrupt files from the library and make sure you have at least 10-15% free space on your HD.

All of my files are analyzed. I had my max screen updates to max and my waveforms are zoomed out for the most part. The only thing that made it better was to set my screen to a lower resolution (1440x852) on my mac. I got a high res option and I'm not sure if this is the cause.

Some MAC's do have a jittery waveform by default. It's not weak ones only, some of the top notch ones have it. But not all do, thats the crazy thing. Lowering your screen res did the trick? What graphics cards does your machine have?

Lowering the screen resolution helped out a little. I have the AMD Radeon HD 6770M 1024 MB Graphics card for my higher performance setting (Which its set to) and the Intel HD Graphics 3000 for lower performance setting. Automatic switching is off in the system preferences menu. I called apple and reported the issue as well. This shouldn't happen on brand new machines out of the box.

Good to know that info. We have seen the automatic graphics switching cause some issues. It is good that you have it off. It usually will boil down to the refresh rate of the MAC / graphics card. It at times doesn't populate the waveform information and colors fast enough which creates the jitter.

What can I do to fix this issue?

Some people can't. Like I said it's not all MAC's, it doesn't make a difference if it is the pro or the basic model, it has to do with the refresh rate of the screen / graphics card. This is the answer that Serato has provided us.

Alright sounds good. Well....wish me luck. Im gigging out with Lion for the first time this week. Snow Leopard was solid so we shall see. Thanks for your help!

Finger crossed. Have fun :)

So I gigged out and had a lot of performance issues. There is a lot of lag loading and scrolling through my library. I turned my wifi off and everything but whenever I play video or MP3's, I get horrible lag loading. Sometimes the audio can't keep up with the computer. I would load a track and some of the waveform is rebuilding it looks like. All of my overviews are built. Im not sure why. Any help with this Chad?

Hey vio0633, I would highlight your entire library and drag and analyze them again, I know it sounds like a pain but it might help

Alright...I will try it out. I think I already did this since I had to reimport everything onto this new drive. Im going to try and post a video to show everyone.

Also, im loading my tracks up from a Western Digital My Passport Studio connected via firewire on my mac.

I was also having waveform issues but only when using Video-SL, they where jerking sooooo much I had no clue but it's funny bec I finally figured it out yesterday how to get them not jerking so much, my output for video-sl was set to 1080i and I went and switched it to 480P and made a big difference, not sure if that wld help

Here is a video clip I made with the offline player to show and better explain whats going on. With the mixer and everything connected up, it is worse. Also, I have my wifi turned off and all of my hard drives sleep timers are set to off.

Rebuilding my overviews. With the quad core MBP, it should take too long :)

Watchwww.youtube.com

Seems like your machine is struggling to stream data off the HD. Have you tried throwing a few videos on the internal drive and seeing if you have the same issue?

I have the same computer specs as you except I'm still on Snow Leopard and I do experience once in awhile the waveforms jerking in the offline player but when I connected my Sl-1 I have no lagging or frezzing at all when loading a video file, the only thing I can think of is maybe bec you are on lion and I know Video-SL is not supported by Lion yet, have you tried and see if you had any updates for your actual laptop that might help??

I wish I could go back to Snow Leopard. Im stuck with Lion on this new MBP. I will try and run it from the internal drive and see if this helps out some.

Based on your video I'm really guessing it will. That's not overviews building. That's a failure to stream data.

So I played a couple more MP3's from the internal drive and still no luck. Uploading a video to show whats going on. Sorry for all the vids....its easier for me to show you guys then explain it.

Watchwww.youtube.com

Crazy...

Your waveforms seem really slow. When they're zoomed right out the display has to load a lot more data. Have you tried zooming them in a notch or two, see if that makes any difference?

Interesting.....zooming out made it worse and zooming in made it load a little quicker.

Zooming in should help. I have seen this of late with video files in the library. Even if you only use them as audio the program still needs to decode them as video. So you do have video files in your library?

Yes, I have both video and audio files. Why the lag you think Chad? I can zoom out but it still doesn't explain the hang up within in the program.

Video is a whole other beast. I'll move this to the Video help section (which we at Rane do not monitor). I also suggest you email support@serato.com and link them to this thread. That way you are sure to get a quick response.

Do you have all the updates for your mac? Installing SmcFancontrol would help keep your mac cool while running video. Maybe try older serato version? Looks very odd.

Can I run 1.9.2 with a late 2011 MBP and Lion OSX? If I can I would...but I don't think the older versions are compatible with Lion.

All my updates are good to go. I will look into SMC Fan Control.

If you don't have it it clearly will help you. Most VSL users if not "all" use it as it keeps the mac cool when ur mac is being pushed to hard. It may even resolve your problem. I always keep it running.

Yes.. you should be able to run any version of SSL with Lion.

Guess I will try it out with an older version. I emailed Serato Support and I'm hoping to hear something from them.

Also just to let you guys know....im not the only person with this issue (a lot of threads in this section with reported performance issues). Can we possibly look into a bug or something that could be causing this?

Any help with this? Im getting horrible performance issues still. My system crashed last week and had to restart in the middle of a gig :(

I feel your pain bro. I am having the same issues with the exact same computer. I got a new hard drive running at 7200 rpms to see if it makes a difference but doesn't seem to.

I am trying a reinstall of Lion this week and let you know what happens. I have the waveform building issue as well. Can't seem to figure it out. I have spoken with a ton of other dj's that have the same issue. Seems to be just on the video end. Hope this problem can be resolved.

Did this start happening right away when you bought the computer or did it happen at a later date? Also did this happen after you upgraded to 2.3.3. Don't know if that could have been the issue.

I had this happen to me when I bought my new mac. The video on the waveform lags and as the night goes on, it gets worse to the point my machine freezes upon load up. One thing I notice is, SSL keeps writing tags for some reason every time I load a video on to it for some reason. I rebuilt all of my overviews and its still doing it. I have a laptop cooling pad and its still doing it. Not sure whats wrong though.

I never had issues or crashing when I ran 1.9.2. I tried to load up 1.9.2 but my 57 wasn't getting recognized for some reason.

Im also running an internal 7500 RPM drive on my mac. My external is run by FW so it shouldn't be lagging from that either.

I think it has something to do with Lion. It may be best to revert back to Snow Leopard if possible....

I can't revert back to Snow Leopard. I have a late 2011 MBP which was loaded with Lion from the factory :(

Buy a Snow Leopard disc for like 30 bucks from the apple store and try it that way...I had to revert back down to Snow Leopard from upgrading to Lion bec of the same problem

Yep @RAYMIXX is right, order the disc online directly from Apple, it's even cheaper than the idiots on ebay!

store.apple.com

Apple sent me a SL retail disc for free and it wouldn't load to my machine. It would give this weird "beep" and tell me Snow Leopard is not compatible with this system.

If your mac came with Snow Leopard and you upgraded to Lion then your cool....you can go back to snow leopard. For me I'm screwed...I got a new MBP with Lion installed and now it won't revert back. I miss snow leopard....it was so simple to use and ran so smooth for me :(

Ah yes, most of the forums do state if you shipped with Lion it's allll yours to keep :) Blame it on the drivers.

Follow the second part of this video explaining how to downgrade to Snow Leopard with the disc, this is the same video I used when I upgraded to Lion than went back down to Snow Lepard...

Watchwww.youtube.com

RAYMIXX, I think you may have missed an important point that was made. For MBP's that were purchased in late 2011, that come with Lion installed, there is no way to downgrade to Snow Leopard because the firmware on the MBP is designed to work with Lion only. I went through this at nauseam with Apple Support and there is no option for running Snow Leopard on the latest MBP's.

vio0633, on Serato Video have you tried to max out your buffer to 2GB? Also, try setting the output quality to "Medium". I have the same late model 2011 MBP and these settings seem to work with all issues except for the jittery waveform, which I still get from time to time. No crashes and no freezes to this point though. I'm running my library off of a G-Tech 750GB mini, @7200RPM using firewire.

@Bruno F, Than we are getting two different answers from apple bec I was told there would be no problem down grading a new Mac with Lion already on it even late 2011

Read attached, jump to section headed: "Which Macs can have Snow Leopard installed, and which can only have Lion installed based on Machine ID (also known as Model Identifier)?"

discussions.apple.com

Bruno....this is what the site says.

MacBook Pro 15" "Late 2011"* only run Lion and later, 15" MacBook Pro "Early 2011" can run Snow Leopard, and can 7,x and earlier Machine IDs.

Of course I have a late 2011 MBP so I'm screwed on this :(

Im not running sera to video. Im running ME on my computer. I don't think ME is the problem....I think its my MBP running serato on this build. Its just laggy and the waveforms are not streaming right for some reason. Even audio cuts in and out sometimes. Is their anything I can attach that will state the performance of my mac when I gig out? A dropout log or something?

There's gotta be a tweak in there somewhere for you. My 2009 model does video ok with ME.. I so sometimes notice a drop in the waveform FPS but nothing I can't deal with.

My core 2 duo machine with Snow Leopard installed did awesome...but it got stolen so this is what I'm working with now. Im thinking of doing another clean install of Lion but thats a last case scenario. Any tips or help from anyone is appreciated!

Hi vio0633,

what is the RPM of your internal hard drive? Are you using an external drive for your video files? If either of these is 5400 RPM with a small amount of cache, I would recommend upgrading them to 7200 RPM sata 3's.

Do you regularly repair your systems disk permissions?

My internal HD has a speed of 7500 RPM. I am using an external drive for my videos. Im not sure exactly what the speed of the HD is, but I have it connected via firewire and its specified to have a data transfer rate of 800mb per second. Here is a link to it. I have the 1TB drive.

www.wdc.com

I do regularly repair my disc permissions and have a program to clean my mac as well (Its called MacCleanse).

Have you tried disabling 'Automatic graphics switching' under 'Energy Saver' in the system preferences?

Yes I have. No change :(

I think I found an issue that maybe is causing my performance problems. Why is it that SSL is rewriting all of the tags? I have all of my videos overviews built....but on the bottom sometimes it says "Writing tags for XXXX". Any reasons why its doing this? Im thinking that this constant loading and writing tags to my files is making my CPU usage spike up.

This issue is still occurring and hasn't been resolved. Slow load times, shaky and disappearing waveforms, low video frame rates on output. Overall horrible performance with a late 2011 quad core macbook pro.

This issue is still occurring and hasn't been resolved. Slow load times, shaky and disappearing waveforms, low video frame rates on output. Overall horrible performance with a late 2011 quad core macbook pro.

Hi vio0633,

are you able to copy some of your audio & video files to your internal drive & see if you still experience the same performance issues without your external drive connected.

Does your external hard drive have a USB port as well as the Firewire 800 port?
If so have you tried that?

Did your Macbook come with Lion installed or did you upgrade to Lion?

What format is your external hard drive?

Zeb,

Thanks for your help! Let me answer your questions....

are you able to copy some of your audio & video files to your internal drive & see if you still experience the same performance issues without your external drive connected. I have tried this but its still not going well. The waveform will dissapeer at times and loading is very slow. Doesnt seem to happen very much with audio files but much more with MP4's.

Does your external hard drive have a USB port as well as the Firewire 800 port?
If so have you tried that? My external has 2 FW ports and 1 USB 2.0 port. I have been using the FW port as it should be better performance. I have tried both FW ports and no change.

Did your Macbook come with Lion installed or did you upgrade to Lion? Mine came with Lion. I dont like it at all and hope the performance issues is related to the OS. Im waiting for your team to officially say Mountain Lion is supported before I upgrade. I want to clean install the new OS as well.

What format is your external hard drive? MAC OS Extended (Journaled)

Another video of me reproducing this issue. Its not as bad as when im in the club, but you can see how the waveforms go in and out, my system locks up when I load some tracks, and performance is just horrible.

Watchwww.youtube.com

I see the same thing when I load HD mp4s...no lock ups, but it does make my bum pucker a little.

Do your waveforms disappear when you load them?

Yeah when I load a track it doesn't always load the WHOLE thing.. if i let it play or scrub through it, it fills out, BUT if i load the track again it didn't save the damn thing.

You know its funny you say this. I have been worried about drop outs during my gigs so I would scrub to the end of it hoping it would fill the waveform out so. Cut it to the end then back to the beginning and for the most part im good.

Hi vio0633,

thanks for uploading the video. Fortunately, this is how it's suppose to work. Buffering audio & drawing waveforms on the fly requires CPU & memory resource, so when the playhead jumps to another location, the audio & video output is prioritized over the waveform shown, this will eventually buffer but in order of priority.

Why is it buffering so much? Are you saying that this is normal for it to do this?

Why is it when I play and the waveforms disappear I get drop outs? When I load a MP4, why does my system lock up and my videos stutter all the time?

Correct me if im wrong....but this shouldnt be happening on the fly. Isnt that why we build overviews so its stored and can be loaded up without the buffering issues?

The waveforms redrawing like that is normal, the audio should not drop out & the decks should not freeze though.

What do you have the USB buffer set too?

What version of SL are you using? If you are using a version older than 2.4.2, I would give that version a try.

Also, have you updated Lion to 10.7.4?

I would also recommend trying the USB port as appose to firewire, firewire 800 should outperform USB 2.0 but there have been cases of people having issues with some firewire drives & Scratch Live, this can be caused by certain chip sets in external enclosures.

If the overviews weren't built, it wouldn't have a waveform to draw & the computer doesn't store buffered audio in memory indefinitely.

My USB buffer is set to 4.

I am running 10.7.4. I want to try it with Mountain Lion but im waiting to hear the official word from you guys. I think its either the OS or my external HD that is causing this. I never had issues like this on my old core 2 duo macbook pro :(

I am using SSL version 2.4.2 as well.

I would definitely try USB with your drive. I recommend using a high quality enclosure like www.glyphtech.com or g-technology.com & installing a hard drive in there yourself. I also recommend staying away from Western Digital altogether. Hitachi or Seagate is the best bet for hard drives.