Chapter 6, The Player
| About the Player | |
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Setting the Target for the Player |
Chapter 6, The Player |
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Playing Back in Multiple Views
The Player view lets you see the result of your work while you work on a composition. You may, at times, have more than one Player view open at a time, each providing a different view of the composition. You can move from a Player view to the fullscreen Player at any point in your session--see The Fullscreen Player.
The Player view has an extensive set of Player controls for playing the composition, setting a repeat mode for playback, scrubbing the composition, adjusting the start or end frames of the composition, setting cue marks and keyframes, navigating to cue marks or keyframes, or turning Autokey on or off--see Using the Player Controls.
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You can also set options for each Player view, such as the target and the target channels, resolution, masks, guides, tool-specific icons, region of interest (improves playback performance), and display LUT.
When you add a Player view to a viewport, it has the following settings by default. You can adjust all of these, except for the repeat mode and f-stop, through the Player options. You adjust the repeat mode in the Player controls--see Using the Player Controls.
Displays the output of the composition.
Follows master time.
Plays all frames and updates at each frame.
Sets the f-stop to 0.00.
Plays at the native rate of the composition.
Does not display any guides apart from the frame outline, or any masks.
Displays RGB.
Has repeat mode set to No Repeat.
Does not correct pixel aspect ratio.
Does not use a display modifier (LUT).
All Toxik images live on a 2D plane.Toxik and PXL use a Cartesian coordinate system to identify points on the plane.This plane and reference system are called the Image Reference Frame (IRF). This reference system has an origin and perpendicular X and Y axes. Units along the X and Y axes have the same length.By default, Toxik images are centered at the origin of the IRF.In Toxik, pixels at the highest resolution have a height of 1 IRF unit, and have a width equal to their pixel aspect ratio, i.e. 1 IRF unit for 1080P HD material, 0.9 for NTSC material, and 16/15 (1.0667) for PAL material.
For images with non unit pixel aspect ratios, the height of a pixel is 1, but the width of a pixel is equal to its aspect ratio (e.g. 0.9 for NTSC). Using IRF units simplifies image manipulation: for example, translating an image by 10 IRF units will move the image by the same amount, regardless of the direction of the translation, horizontal, vertical, or any combination thereof.
The target for the Player view is what it displays. You set the target for an individual view in the Player options. The target can be the output node of the dependency graph, the input or output of a tool node, a specific rendered output of the composition, or a context point (the output of a specific tool node)--see Setting the Target for the Player.
You can specify the channels of the target you want the Player view to display (RGBA, RGB, A, or any other combination of channels)--see Setting the Channels for the Target.
You can set the resolution you want a Player view to use for its target (full, half, quarter, or proxy). You can use this to improve playback performance when full resolution playback is not necessary--see Setting the Resolution for a Player and Playback Performance.
You can set the aspect ratio of the pixels the Player uses for the target, to either square or non-square pixels--see Setting the Pixel Aspect Ratio of the Player.
A context point is a specific tool node you mark as the target for a Player view. No matter which tool node you select, the view always displays that context point.
Context points are especially useful when you want to see how changes to a tool node that precedes the node with context point affect the context point. You can have the Player view display the output from a context point. You can set a maximum of four context points.
You set a context point in the Schematic view--see Working in the Schematic View. You use Player options to set the target for a Player view to a context point--see Setting the Target for the Player.
You can have any combination of workspaces including the Player, Schematic, and Curve Editor views, the three views affected by the Player controls. You can use the Player controls to play the composition in only the view currently in focus, or all the views simultaneously.
Master time is an abstract time you can use to synchronize playback among two or more Player, Schematic, and Curve Editor views. You synchronize playback between two views by setting both to follow master time. You can also set an offset for each view, so you can see different parts of the composition playing at the same time. For example, if you are creating a mask, you might have two Players, one in which to create the mask, and one to preview what's ahead, so you can take changes into account as you create the mask.
Master time always starts at frame 0, and has a duration equal to the length of the composition. If a composition starts at frame 215 and ends at 564, master time starts at frame 0 and ends at frame 349.
Standalone time is the opposite of master time. In standalone time, the view responds to the Player controls only if it currently has the focus; if another view has focus at that time, the view set to standalone time remains static. You can also set an offset for standalone time; in this case the offset is relative to the composition time.
You set a view to use master or standalone time using the Follow Master preference in the Playback tab of the view options. By default the view is set to use master time--see Synchronizing or Separating Playback between Views.
The ability to play compositions and media in real time depends on both hardware configuration and software optimizations.
Internally, the two key features used to improve playback performance are tiling and the media cache. The media cache keeps images that have been loaded close at hand on the local drive for faster retrieval.
To improve playback performance, you can turn on hardware rendering (if you are compositing with Reaction) and/or define a region of interest. Each of these has trade-offs (usually between quality and speed) and therefore may or may not be feasible in a given situation.
Images are automatically divided into tiles and processed. Instead of processing an entire frame, only those tiles that are part of the result of the operation need processing.
Each tile is 512 by 512 pixels. The number of tiles loaded in the Player at any point depends on the resolution of the image, the zoom level of the Player, and the region of interest, if one is defined--see Region of Interest:
In general, a zoom level that displays only a detail of the complete image requires fewer tiles than a zoom level that displays the complete image. For example, if you zoom in so that the Player displays only the top-left corner of the frame, it loads only the tiles needed to display that area of the frame. Note that the resolution optimization performed during zooms may have an influence on the number of tiles--see Resolution.
A region of interest that contains only part of the image, requires fewer tiles than a larger one or than the complete image. Only the tiles that are part of the region of interest are loaded. You can set the Player to show or hide the area of the loaded tiles that falls outside the region of interest--see Showing or Hiding Tiles.
You can set the resolution that a Player view or the fullscreen Player uses--see Setting the Resolution for a Player. When full resolution is not required, working at less than full resolution can improve playback performance.
When you change the resolution a Player, a new copy of the image is retrieved and added to the media cache at the new resolution and tiled for that resolution.
Note: When you zoom out in the Player, the resolution is automatically adjusted to the optimal one for that zoom level. This reduces the load on the computer.
You can switch to hardware rendering when using Reaction to improve playback performance when the quality of the output is secondary to the speed of playback--see Turning Hardware Rendering On or Off.
Note: Only Reaction nodes benefit from hardware rendering. For all other tool nodes, switching to hardware rendering has no effect.
You can define a subsection of the frame processed for playback by defining a region of interest. This can improve playback by limiting the area of the frame that needs to be processed for the playback.
The region of interest has no effect on rendering an output. When you render an output, the entire frame is always rendered. The Region of Definition (ROD) is used to determine the area to render when you render an output.
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