After upgrading to Mojave MacOS, we are having significant performance issues with our existing CA live-streaming setups. Our setup is this:

CA 2018 or 2019 (720 project, 20fps) -> Wirecast or OBS (via NDI or Syphon, tried both) -> RTMP (1.5mbps 30fps 540p) to our servers

When running some of our triggered animations of our puppets, the FPS out of CA drops to single digits, and seems to combat Wirecast or OBS, which in turn drops dozens/hundreds frames on Wirecast or OBS. This did not happen in previous versions of MacOS, and we have taken the same project files/config and run them on an identical High Sierra machine with no issues, so there seems to be a priority battle for real-time processing that Wirecast and CA fight over with some more intensive animations.

MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2016)
2.6 GHz Intel Core i7
16gb ram
Radeon Pro 450 2048 MB
Intel HD Graphics 530 1536 MB

The new Replays feature is cool, but it is missing a “loop forever” mode. I want to hit a trigger (e.g. latched) and have the sequence play forever until the trigger is hit again. At present a replay plays once and stops and you have to trigger it again to get it to repeat, even when trigger latching is on.

I assume a third replay mode of “loop forever while triggered” is wanted as a trigger mode.

The usecase is an “idle” state for the puppet. You can record an idle state (fidgeting etc) and and some other states (“frustrated”, “angry”, “tired”, “bored” etc) then when live streaming you just hit a key to change the state and the puppet keeps acting in that way until the state changes again. The replay might be like 20+ seconds long so it does not feel too repetitive.

The problem i'm having right now with creating different emotion sets (sad, confused, happy etc.) is that it's something very basic and important, yet time consuming and complicated to do on a live performance.

my idea is:
if we could somehow for example, connect between the "smile" behavior that the camera tracks from the face, and connect it to other elements created for a smile set like eyebrows, eyes, cheeks etc. which will be triggered automatically.

if you make a sad/smile/surprised face, the camera detects it and automatically triggers sad eyes, eyebrows, maybe even body poses!

basic emotions that are very important for the performance, automatically by the camera, without needing to create complex sets of triggers, key binds etc.

Just a thought :)

While editing and streaming, performance is very important. For people with lower powered computers, things can become sluggish. It would be great to have a global setting that adjusted settings like resolution of images created (if that speed things up), mesh density (if that speeds things up), and so forth. Then while editing/streaming, the setting can be cranked back to what the computer supports. When doing a media export, the setting can be set back to full resolution where it does not have to be real-time display. (Just go grab a coffee for the final render.) But the setting should be global, not part of the puppets, so people on different computers can adjust for their particular machine. (E.g. I have a cheap laptop and a powerful desktop. I don’t want to have to change all the puppets to move between computers.)