Clips

Clips are the real nuts and bolts of Resolume. Without clips we wouldn't have any content to throw at the screens and speakers.

A clip is usually a video. But it can be a lot more than that. A clip can also be a still image. It could also be an audio file, or even a combination of audio and video.

Clips can also contain Sources - like a live camera or plugins that generate content on the fly. Basically a clip is any type of media you create your output with.

Loading Clips

Clips can be loaded into your composition by either dragging and dropping files from a folder onto empty clips or by using the files panel. You can drag and drop files from the files panel into empty clips.

This panel also allows you to create favorite folders (by pressing the heart icon), granting you quick access to them through the drop-down menu. The button right from the heart icon enables/disables thumbnails for your clip. The drop-down menu also gives you quick access to your snapshots, renders and recordings.

PRO TIP: You can double click on a file in the Files panel to preview it in your preview monitor.

Triggering Clips

Triggering a clip is as simple as clicking its thumbnail. When you're sick of a clip, you can either trigger a new one in its place. Or press the big X to the left of the layer to eject it.

That's it. That's really all a good VJ does. Trigger the right clip at the right time. You can now stop reading the manual.

Still here? Cool. Because there are loads of options!

Column Triggering

A column is a vertical set of clips.

You can trigger multiple clips at the same time by triggering the column. This is a great way to quickly switch looks by triggering a set of clips that work well together.

Trigger Settings

You can change how individual clips respond to a trigger.

Tip! Want to change a setting before a clip is live? No problem. You can select a clip, rather than trigger it, by clicking the name handle underneath the thumbnail.

Bonus Tip! All the functions described below can can be changed for multiple clips at the same time as well. Shift select the clips, and then change the function via the Clip menu or the right click drop down.

Beat Snap

You can use the Beat Snap option to have clips wait until the next beat, the next bar, in 2 bars, in 4 bars and so on, before it starts. This is particularly useful for audio-visual music clips.

In some music software, this feature is known as "Quantising".

You can set the Beat Snap option for an individual clip. Select the clip and select the Clip > Beat Snap menu option.

If you set the clip setting to 'Composition determined', it will use whatever the Composition setting is.

You can set the Beat Snap option for the whole Composition through the Composition > Beat Snap menu options.

Clip Target

Own Layer

The default thing that happens when you click a clip is that it plays in the layer it is on. This is the most organised and easy to follow way of triggering.

Active Layer

If you prefer, you can change that so the clip will play in whichever layer you have active at the moment of triggering. This will let you improvise more quickly with a large set of content.

Free Layer

There's also the option to trigger a clip in whichever layer is free. The Free Layer Clip Target mode is particularly fun when used with the Piano Trigger Style mode (see below).

You can then play 'chords' of clips with the keyboard or a MIDI device - each of them will be displayed for as long as it is selected. 

Obviously, you will need as many layers as you want to play simultaneous clips.

Composition Determined

Like Beat Snap, you can change this setting for the whole Composition (Composition > Clip Target) and for individual clips (Clip > Clip Target)

Trigger Style

As you get more advanced with Resolume you might want to take a look into clip trigger styles. These styles determine how your clips are being triggered. Using Clip Trigger styles allow for more control over your performance.

Composition Clip Trigger Style

You’ve might never noticed, but you have been using clip trigger styles for a while now. Each clip needs a trigger condition, the default condition is set under the composition tab under clip trigger style.

By default the style is set to normal. But if you want to change the default behavior of all your clips at once you can do it here.

Adjusting Trigger Style

To set the style of one or multiple clips, simply select them. Right click on one of the clips and under trigger style, select the desired style.

Normal

This is the behavior you are used to from your clips. When a clip is triggered, the clip starts. When triggered again, the clip restarts

Toggle

This clip trigger style has the behavior of a switch. When a clip is triggered, the clip starts. When it is triggered again, it turns itself off.

Piano

The piano style makes your clip behave like, well, a key on a piano. When triggered the clip starts playing. When released, it stops playing. With this style you have to physically hold the key, mouse or shortcut down to keep the clip playing.

Fader Start

When Fader Start is enabled for a clip or a layer, the clip will re-start from the beginning every time you fade up the layer it's playing in.

This is useful for clips that should start exactly from the time you bring them in, like song lyrics or intro animations. You can keep them triggered in a layer, ready to go, and when the moment comes, start them by fading them in.

Tip! In combination with the "pick-up' playmode (described further below), you can also turn this feature into a Fader Stop. The clip will then remain paused where it was the moment you fade down the layer, and continue where it was when you fade it back up.

Fader Start can be set per clip (Clip > Fader Start), or the whole layer (Layer > Fader Start).

Ignore Column Trigger

This option allows you to 'lock' a clip or entire layer, so that when you trigger another column, that particular clip will not get replaced and just keeps playing. The option can be found in both the Clip and Layer menus.

This is particularly useful when using a single clip as a background, or when you are using Resolume to record a video clip, and you want to keep playing a single audio track while you're mixing.

Resize

Here you can quickly set your clips to either Fill/Fit/Stretch to the current compositions size, or go back to the original pixel dimensions.

This is not a setting that stays fixed! Rather it's a quick way to make sure all your clips are the same size, and then you can go into the clip properties and further tweak the values.

Not sure what Fill, Fit and Stretch do exactly? They're explained below, where we talk about the Clip Properties in greater detail.

Thumbnails

Oh yes! You can update the thumbnail of a clip to the current frame, or even to how it looks with the clip effects applied. If you're really picky about your thumbs, you can even load a still from disk.

Not happy how your thumbnails turned out? You can always revert back to the original.

Persistent Clips

Persistent clips carry over from deck to deck. You can mark one or more clips as persistent via the Clip menu. When you then switch to another deck, these persistent clips will be loaded in the same slot in every deck you switch to. 

This is useful for longer shows, where you always want to have access to a particular set of clips, but not be tied down to a single deck. Promotor logos, flashes or live cameras come to mind. 

Did you have an important clip in a deck, which is now covered by a persistent clip? Don't worry!

Resolume will let you know there was another clip in the slot by showing it as a little thumbnail in the top left. You can use this thumbnail to free the clip. Just by dragging it to an empty slot.

Cut/Copy/Paste/Rename/Clear

If you really don't know what CTRL-c and CTRL-v do, I suggest sitting down with a good friend and asking him or her to show it to you.

Also, props to you because I wouldn't have made it through college without copy/pasting stuff from people that were smarter than me.

Paste Effects

One option that may stand out is 'Paste Effects'. This will let you copy a clip into memory using CTRL-c, and then paste just the effects onto one or more other clips using Paste Effects. This feature may be familiar to you from good old Final Cut Pro and it's a really quick way to get the same look on a set of clips.

Show & Strip

Show in Finder or Show in Explorer as it's called on Windows, will open a Finder or Explorer window with that clip selected. Show in File Browser does the same but reveal the clip in Resolume's own browser. This is really useful when replacing sets of content.

The Strip options will let you strip the audio or video track from a clip.

Careful! Removing the video track when there is no audio track will effectively delete the clip! Don't say I didn't warn you!

Snapshot

This option makes a still frame png of how your clip looks right at that moment. It saves the frame to your Recorded folder in Documents and also imports it to the first empty clip slot in your bottom layer.

Copy Image

This option can be found by clicking on the cogwheel icon in the bottom of the monitor.
This will copy the current frame of that monitor to your clipboard. From there you can either paste it onto an empty clip or use it in another application. We recommend Tinder.

The same method can be used to copy images from anywhere onto an empty clip.

Clip Colors

Yes! You can now give each clip or set of clips its own nice pastelly highlight.

Auto Pilot

Using the Auto Pilot, you can let Resolume automatically play a different clip when the current clip finishes. Options include the next and previous clip, a random clip, the first or last clip in a layer, or even a specific clip.

You can also turn on the Auto Pilot for the whole layer. Handy for that quick bathroom break. Or when you need to explain that you're really not the DJ to that one person that won't stop requesting that new banger by DJ Snake.

Loops

By setting the loops value, you can control how many times a clip loops before it executes its auto pilot action.

Layer Determined

By default, a clip's Auto Pilot setting is set to Layer Determined. This means that it will look to the layer's Auto Pilot setting for what to do. So if the layer Auto Pilot is set to play the next clip, all clips that are set to Layer Determined will play the next clip. 

Layer Determined is particularly useful if you want to turn the autopilot on and off as part of your live performance. You can change the setting in one place, and all clips will automatically follow along. 

When using the autopilot to program more complex sequences, you'll probably want to set it per clip.

Clip Properties

The clip properties give you important info about the clip. Geeky stuff like the codec and fps, but also useful stuff like the length and default BPM.

When you toggle down the individual audio and video properties, you get access to some more finetuning options.

Audio Properties

The audio properties are only visible if your clip has an audio track. Duh.

Use the X button to delete the audio track. You can use this to remove the audio track from a video if you do not need it.

Using the audio properties, you can set the volume for this clip individually. This is useful for balancing the volume of clips that will play on a layer. Also, you can pan this clip individually.

Video Properties

Tip! Drag a video clip from the browser over the blue video area. This allows you to replace the content, but keep any effects and parameter changes you had applied to the original!

Use this bad boy to resize the clip to the size of the current composition. This is great when your content isn't at the right size already.

Clicking this multiple times will cycle through a few options available for scaling. 

• Fill. This will make sure the clip fills the entire composition, while maintaining its aspect ratio. This will result in the sides or the top and bottom of the clip being cropped off. 
• Fit. This will make sure your clip is completely visible, while maintaining its aspect ratio. This will result in black borders being visible on the sides or top and bottom.
• Stretch. This stretches the clip to the composition width and height, distorting the clip when necessary. 
• Original. This returns the clip to its original size. 

Click this to clear the video from the clip, leaving the audio intact.

Use the RGB toggles to subtract colour channels from the clip. Using combinations of these, you can quickly colorise a clip to the three primary Red, Green and Blue, as well as the secondary colours Cyan, Magenta and Yellow.

The A toggle can be used to disable transparency in a clip. This will only be available if your clip has an alpha channel in it.

When you fold open the extended properties, you get access to Opacity, Width & Height, Blend Mode and Alpha Channel interpretation of a clip.

Opacity

This will fade out your clip's visibility, gradually fading it to black.

Width & Height

Here you can change the resolution of the clip using exact pixels.

Blend Mode

This will let you set which blend mode this clip uses when it's playing in a layer. This will override whatever blend mode you have selected on the layer, for as long as this clip is playing.

Alpha Type

Here you can tell how to interpret the alpha channel information in your clip. Resolume will default to "Premultiplied". This is the default setting that After Effects uses for exports with an alpha channel. So most of the time, you don't even have to worry about this.

Are you seeing a weird halo around your edges? Then you probably want to switch to "Straight".