I cannot use visual effects or add a background to my video

« To Studio visual effects and virtual backgrounds: Overview

Follow these steps when:

• You see one of these messages on Riverside:
  • Visual effects unavailable
  • New recording track created
• Your computer is having difficulty processing your virtual background in real time

Likely causes:

Visual effects requires at least an 8-core processing device and needs more available video memory (VRAM) and/or system memory (RAM) to process virtual backgrounds in real time. Issues with visual effects are usually caused by a device not meeting requirements or device strain.

Suggested troubleshooting steps

If you are having trouble adding a visual effect to your video in the studio, follow the steps below.

• Make sure your device has 8 or more processing cores.
  • Even if your device meets our minimum requirements, it may still encounter strain depending on its current workload.
• Refresh the page with Riverside and join the studio again.
• Close all tabs, windows, and programs that you do not need during the recording.
• Restart your computer, then only open the Riverside studio.
• Change your studio's resolution to 720p or 1080p. You will not see the option for visual effects if your Studio is set for 4k recording. 
• Stop the recording and reduce the default video recording quality or change the frame rate to 24 FPS.
• Turn on graphics acceleration (sometimes called hardware acceleration) to give your browser an extra processing boost. 
• Try adding a virtual background from a different device, either from a Chrome, Safari, or Edge browser, Mac app, or mobile app.
  • Stop the recording
  • Remove the virtual background
  • Immediately begin a new recording without virtual backgrounds
• If you're using an external camera, switch to using the internal camera on your computer, or turn off your camera's auto-exposure feature.
• If you're using a computer, switch to a different computer, like a faster or newer one.
  • If using a Mac with an Apple Silicon processor, try using the visual effects in the Mac app.
• Connect your computer to a power source, if it is not already plugged in.
• If recording on a Windows computer, also try changing its power mode to Best performance.
• Instead of using a background blur effect, upload a background image or pick from one from Riverside's collection.