Masks, Stills, Grab, Freeze and scratch

[John McGeoch]

I use Resolume for a varity of gigs from music to theatre to installation. I now pretty much use Avenue for all these although it took a while to change from 2.4 to 3 owing to th new way of working and some of the changes. I now have a list of features that I certainly would use / need / desire etc.

First up is masking - I would really like a pre and post render switch for masks because any manipulation on the clip also manipulates the mask which often renders it useless. This is particularly necessary when using architecture / buildings / surfaces as screens and getting a piece of video to sit in a particular part of the screen / building. If the mask ignored the rendering ( rescaling, tilt etc ) then the video could just sit happily in a mask which corresponds to the building / screen.

Next up is stills, which is a sad loss from 2.4. I used to use stills a lot. Ideally any number of stills coul be loaded into a clip box and then run through at any speed - although Resolume 2.4 suffered from not being able to run through stills slow enough - it woul be excellent if they could jump forward or back on the arrow keys or be tap tempo`d, or just set to cut or fade at definable times up to 30 or more seconds.

Thirdly it would be good to grab a frame as well as a video from within Resolume and for it to be loaded into the composition.

Lastly it would be good for a freeze button to just stop everything dead. Doing festivals often means doing bands rather than djs and to have the graphics hammering on after the music has stopped looks wrong and if there is lots of tracks it takes too long to pause them all. Currently I would freeze everything on the switcher but it would be better to be able to do it in Resolume, then grab the frozen frame, move it to the top and set up the next set of visuals underneath it ready for bringing in the next number.

IS there any way to zoom in when grabbing the clip transport to scratch the video better. With a long piece of video on the timeline scratching it is too jerky. Ideally one woul want to get to the piece taht one wanted to scratch and then once one had `grabbed` the video one coul zoom in like on an editor timeline to allow much finer scratching of the section, maybe using the up down arrow keys whilst holding down on the video.

Finally many thanks for having the dedication to create such a great piece of software and all the advances on version 2

ps The new ability to use the transparency in PNG files is great is there any way to create video files with a transparent layer? Will it just be via Flash files?

pps the new ability to move clips around is just great, makes working at a pace SO much easier.

[Joris]

Hi John

Thanks a lot for your comments and suggestions. It's greatly appreciated to hear how you're actually using Avenue and what your thoughts on it are.

Regarding the masking, this has been requested by other users as well. We figured that on a per clip level, the mask should follow the clip. To achieve masking for mapping purposes, I generally use a new layer on top of the layer stack, set to a multiply blend mode.

It's interesting that you mention stills, since Resolume was initially conceived to display series of still frames, preferably as fast as possible. These days however the majority of content is video, and that's where the focus lies. You could achieve a similar effect by rendering out the stills as a video file. Also, if you want dynamic content, a good place to start would be Flash. One of our users has posted a file recently on VJforums (http://vjforums.com/showthread.php?p=242586#post242586) that allows dynamic loading of still images and movieclips.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by grabbing frames or videos. You can render your output to disk by using the record button on the far right. Is this along the lines of what you're looking for?

To freeze the output, you can apply the 'freeze' effect on the composition. While active you can change the output, and when the new setup is ready, you can unfreeze.

At the moment, there is no way to zoom in on the timeline. It's something worth considering, and we'll look into it.

Depending on your platform, there's a couple of codecs that support transparency (PNG and Animation on OSX and Sorenson Video 3 on Windows). We're also working on supporting transparency in our very own DXV codec.

Thanks again for your suggestions, and I hope you can use some of the tips here to achieve some of the things you're missing.

Joris

[edwin]

- Masks: We put the mask issue on our todo-list, we realise it would make sense to have an option for pre or post masking.
-Stills: A lot of people still seem to use a stills a lot, so we need to see how we can bring this back. But it does not have top priority.
- Srcatch: Hold down Ctrl when moving any slider to adjust it more precise. For the clip transport control you can also bring up the 'quicklook' window (click on the magnifier icon) to zoom in a bit more.

ps: Hold down the 'P' key to and move your mouse to adjust the position of the active clip
use the 'S' for scaling.

[John McGeoch]

Many thanks for the replies and tips and, as usual, some solutions are already available, if one knows where to look! I`m really glad that the pre and post render masks are in the pipeline as this will lend a whole new area of sophistication to Resolume as an installation and architectural VJ/ video art tool.

I realise that I can record a piece of screen output as a video I just want to do this as a single still as well.

As regards stills, recording them as video is too slow for my work which often requires input from the gig or at least the time just before the gig. Maybe the flash development tool you mention would be the thing. For instance I often work with a photographer at a gig and want to map the pictures, usually of people, or eyes or similar, straight onto part of the building or structure - ideally these would be downloaded from the camera, scaled and then put in a drawer for access by Resolume as a single `pot` that I could control the speed of change and the manner of transition.

As a new question does Resolume have any issues with long video files and audio? I did a gig on Inverness Islands for Halloween and built a screen shaped and painted up like a large gravestone - amongst the `spooky` graphic mapping was an area that showed a 25 minute film of `horror` shorts which had periodic problems with the audio distorting. In this case the film just ran whilst the rest of the screen could be manipulated and effected.
best wishes - John McGeoch

[Joris]

Hi John

Regarding the stills: for doing gigs relying on such dynamic content updates, I generally recommend going through Flash or a similar app which can handle the changes in the 'pot' programmatically. That way you won't be burdening Resolume with the task of constantly checking for and loading new files.

Regarding the playback: In general, Resolume should be able to play back long files with both audio and video without hickups, when compressed correctly. If you are experiencing problems with a particular file, we'd love to take a look at it. Can you send it to us? (if needed, we can give you access to our FTP server if it is too big to upload).

Joris

[John McGeoch]

Thanks Joris - I will look into Flash as a method for doing this, especially with the new wifi SD cards which allow instant access to camra files. I will look at the file in question which played fine in media player but was only recognised as audio in Resolume and then when I re -rendered it had glitches. best wishes John