Jump to content

Mike Fahl

Member
  • Posts

    723
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Mike Fahl

  1. WATCHOUT does not use quicktime any longer on the Display computer side

     

    Not entirely true. WATCHOUT no longer requires QuickTime. But if you have it on the machine, it can still use it to play content not supported natively by WATCHOUT. WATCHOUT natively plays QuickTime Animation and H.264 video in .MOV files without using QuickTime. Yes, this is somewhat confusing. The reason being that QT Animation is still the most widely used video file format when there's a need for alpha channel in the video, so we provide our own codec here. H.264 is also commonly used in MOV files, and MOV is essentially the standard container format for H.264, even when the file has other extension, such as M4V and MP4, so we provide a codec for this as well.

     

    But for other formats in MOV files (e.g., MJPEG, Sorensson, etc), QT will be used as a fallback if available. Note that use of these formats is deprecated in WATCHOUT, and is really only supported as legacy formats. Using them may have negative impact on performance, not just of the video itself, but also of other content played at the same time.

     

    Mike

  2. Yes, playing a large video as a pre-split still has the advantage of possibly spreading it across larger number of threads. So depending on the threading capacity of your CPU, this may help in some cases. However, there's of course also a certian overhead associated with playing multiple videos compared to playing just one. Finally, you also have the issue of creating a single large video, at very high resolution (e.g., 4000 pixels across) compared to creating a number of smaller videos at more "standard" resolutions. It can be done, and WATCHOUT can play such high res videos, but many video encoding tols are constrained here.

     

    Mike

  3. The frame blending feature introduced in recent version of WATCHOTU should make any irregularities caused by differences in framerate less noticable, since it smoothes out such differences. So I'd say go with the original framerate of your footage, and let WATCHOUT "upsample" it to its own rendering rate using frame blending, as long as you're happy with the results.

     

    Mike

  4. You likely have multiple network interfaces in your computer, and the one you use is not the primary one. Make the interface that's being plugged in the primary one by putting it at the top of the list of network interfaces as described here:

     

       http://superuser.com/questions/117507/how-can-i-change-the-binding-order-of-network-adapters-in-windows-7

     

    We're working on an improvement to handle this situation more gracefully in the next version of WATCHOUT.

     

    Mike

  5. We're currently in the process of revising our remote app for iOS 7. As part of this, we have some hope that we'll be able to make it work for Android as well (at lest recent versions of Android using the Chrome browser). Will let you know, hopefully in a few days.

     

    Mike

  6. Each display computer keeps a log in its log folder inside the WATCHOUT applicaiton folder. So if the messages originated from display computers, you can see them there. Likewise, the production software keeps a simlar log file of its own messages.

     

    Hope this helps.

     

    Mike

  7. I think you can do this already, albeit in a somewhat manual way. Try this:

    • Make a 10% gray rectangle image (PNG), about the size of the none-overlap area, possibly with a very slightly feathered edge (one or a few pixels only), where the image fades to black. No alpha channel needed.
    • Create an auxiliary timeline in the Task window that sits on top of all others.
    • Add the above mentioned image to this Aux timeline, one for each non-overlap area. Scale and position the rectangle to eactly fit the darker area.
    • Add a Color tween track, and use its Brightness setting to tone down the image so it's just bright enough to match the brightness in the overlap areas.
    • Set the blending mode of each of those cues to "Lighten".

    I haven't tried this myself, but I think it should allow you to get pretty close. At least it could provide a way for further exploration of this idea. Let us know how this works out.

    Mike

×
×
  • Create New...