Dear PsychoPy Community,
My research team and I are in the process of building an experiment that involves viewing a children’s film (saved as a .mp4 file) to participants, and then having them later recall the events of the movie in order. The entire movie is 1 hour and 59 minutes long. Not being too familiar with Python code, I used the builder viewer to design the experiment, using the Movie Component to incorporate the video into the experiment.
As I try to run the experiment directly on PsychoPy, the experiment begins with all of the routines I created to play before the movie. However, once I cue it to move to the next routine where the movie should play, it takes ages for the movie to load. I waited about 4 hours for the movie to load into PsychoPy and the experiment stayed frozen into the position of the routine directly before the movie.
I extracted the first five minutes of the film into a separate .mp4 file and decided to run that instead for the experiment. It also takes about 15-20 minutes to load while the experiment is up and running, which is not as bad as my previous attempt above, but still quite a while. While I play the 5 minute clio, though, I noticed on several occasions that the display would freeze in the middle of the film while the audio would continue, causing the display and audio to be out of sync with one another.
Here is a screenshot of what the movie component properties are for the 5 minute clip:
I attempted to load this experiment (with the 5 minute movie clip) onto Pavlovia, as we would like our participants to view the movie “online.” However, with just the 5 minute clip, after I input the participant demographics prior to starting the experiment, it takes over 2 hours (I’ve timed it) for the experiment to begin running on Pavlovia. This is just with the 5 minute clip; I have not attempted to run the entire film on Pavlovia, seeing that it did not run on PsychoPy.
Are there any suggestions for what I can possibly do to navigate these issues: 1. the extremely long waiting time for my experiments to load/begin as I run my movie (both in PsychoPy and on Pavlovia)? 2. making sure my movie does not freeze while playing so the audio and video stay in sync?
Thanks so much for any assistance offered!