[PD] GEM questions

[David Powers]

Hello everyone,

I am working with GEM on a Windows XP, using Hans' extended release. 
This Saturday, some guys from Perlon record label will be here, and I am 
going to do some visuals. I have some stuff made in a program called 
Visual Jockey that I can use, but I would really like to do some stuff 
in Gem. So, I have these questions:

a) What known issues are there, that might make patches crash, that 
would be best to avoid using in patches? GEM does crash more than PD! As 
far as I know, I'm probably best off NOT using any movie clips, as 
loading clips seems to be the biggest issue causing crashes and hogging 
CPU also (both AVI and QUICKTIME as far as I can tell)...

b) Does anyone have advice on organizing patches and rendering chains 
for a show? This is the hard part for me, I can get individual rendering 
chains that look cool, but I'm worried about organizing and switching in 
some kind of meta-patch. Is it better to have one big patch with sub 
patches, or to open seperate patches at once?

c) On a related note, I notice that effects I might put in the render 
chain don't have ON/OFF, there is just ON/OFF for entire rendering 
chain. So, suppose I have a pix_multiimage that I want to run through a 
couple of different effects - not simultaneously. Is the best strategy 
to just have the same pix_multiimate in two different rendering chains, 
with a selection interface?

Thanks,
David