If you have high resolution images (for example, greater than 1.5Mbytes per image), we recommend you create more manageable copies of your images, called proxy images. You can use lower resolution images, movie files, or luminance-only images for proxies.
If you create lower-resolution proxies, make sure they have the exact same aspect ratio as the full resolution images. For example, if the full resolution image is 2048 x 1536 and the proxy image is half-size, the proxy image should have the dimensions 1024 x 768.
To scale full resolution images to proxies, use the dmconvert script (available on Linux only). For example, to convert a 100-image sequence of D1 video resolution images (720x486) to half resolution (360x243), type the following command as one line:
dmconvert -f rgb -n full.rgb.####,start=1,end=100,step=1 -p video,size=360x243 full.rgb.#### half.rgb.####
where full.rgb and half.rgb represent the starting and resulting file names. Remember to change end=100 to the number of images you are converting.
Black and white, luminance-only images can also serve as proxies.
You can convert images using the imgcvt command (available for Linux and Windows) or by choosing the Luminance setting on the Setup Cache control panel. Both actions increase playback speed. The difference is when you want to wait for the images to convert. Using imgcvt, the conversion occurs on your hard disk once. Using the Setup Cache control panel, the conversion occurs in memory at run time and reoccurs each time your image cache is purged.
If you run the imgcvt utility, use the following example as a model:
imgcvt -r 1-341 sand.#.rgb sand.#.bw
