Hey Joris,
Remember what we were talking about awhile back, to have an Advanced Section in the Preferences, which would give power users, granular control over Resolume's playback engine/UI/Output, I think this may be the time to have that talk with the rest of the team...
@Oaktown Even though yes you could go the route of a Arena Pro, but i don't think that is necessary, the granular control is an "use at your own risk" situation, and it comes with warnings, and 2 stage activation process for any feature. So the locking of the refresh rate, the changing of the behaviour of the engine from predictive to smooth, etc. Could be options within this menu tab.
Unfortunately this gives all sorts of unexpected behaviour, since it involves handing complete control to the playback engine, and thereby we're forced to bypass other steps in the pipeline. For instance, audio playback will use the system settings, rather than Resolume's settings. This means that by changing a clip to this playback mode, all of a sudden your audio will be routed to the system default and completely ignore the volume and master faders in Resolume.
So case in point, we make the option of smooth playback, the UI "hides" all volume settings from the user, because this now is handled by the system, as would be like any other server the audio engineer is responsible for that volume control, because the content would have been normalized and made palatable to the ears of the audience.
There are ways to look at it and of course, @Joris I thank you for explaining how the engine works with the predictive look-ahead algorithm, in its playback state. Didnt't know so much crazy magic was happening in there.
And for sure, definitely have to give the team mad crazy props for all the improvements & advancements, while keeping costs down. It is appreciated from this end.
my 2 cents.