Resolume Forum

What does 'frozen' mean? Just showing the last frame before you froze it? Or should it keep on playing clips but without having applied the changes you've made to effects since the moment you froze it?

What does 'frozen' mean? Just showing the last frame before you froze it?

Yes.

The idea is to be able to keep content on the screen while working on other things. Then one would be able to unfreeze/release the comp to whatever is active at the moment.

If I understand correctly it's the same as taking a screenshot of the last frame and locking all the slices in the AO to display that but anything that happens in the main UI keeps playing, so even the comp/preview keeps updating.

I also believe this is a very good feature to have for big shows. Although then we also need a good indicator to inform the user that the output is frozen

I imagine this feature like this:
your clips are playing, parameters animating,
push a button which brings you into 'Preview' mode.
your composition and clips are still playing, parameters animating, but anything you do in the gui does not affect your output now.
You can launch clips, change parameters, you see what you do in a preview monitor, but your output is still the same as before.
When you have finished adjusting stuff, set a fade time for the transition between the states, push a button to transition to this state.
If you don't like what you did, you would also have an option that would get you right back to the live state without changing anything.

Obviously this would be quite heavy on your GPU, your composition would be rendered twice in cases.

The 'Freeze' effect has a 'Frozen Solid' checkbox.
You can fake the behaviour you guys are after doing the following.
Add an extra Layer to your Composition and add a Video Router to a Clip in that layer.
When you preview that layer this will be effectively the Composition preview. On the Composition you add the 'Freeze' effect and map the 'Frozen solid' checkbox to a shortcut.

So when the 'Freeze' effect is active your Composition content is frozen. You can preview whatever happens in that Composition by previewing your top Layer. Of course the downside is that you can't use any effects on the Composition level because those will be directly visible.


We could also fix this by providing a more extensive preview system, we make it so that you can Preview a Clip/Layer/Composition by clicking on it's Effects, and it will generate a preview up to the selected Effect.

When you preview that layer

I think the unique selling point of this feature is having both the Preview and the Output Monitor still reflect the changes. That way you can work on individual clips, layers and groups, while still seeing how they affect the overall comp output at the same time. If you need to have the layer router selected for active preview, you can't select anything else without losing the comp view and you're just clicking back and forth between views the whole time.

Otherwise grouping all the layers and putting master effects on the group, and a single Freeze effect on the comp itself would already get her done.

Edwin, this is definitely going in the right direction except for the lack of flexibility in the preview mode with the router as Joris pointed out.

In essence, if we could put the Freeze effect above the Monitor in the Comp tab and have a preview of the Freeze effect in Frozen Solid mode while being able to see the preview of the comp below the effect that would do the trick.