Preview WMV and audio file at WATCHOUT 6.2.1

[FUM]

 

I am using WATCHOUT 6.2.1.

When WMV video is put on the timeline, it can not be previewed on the stage as movie.

 

Played as a still image.

 

And the audio icon is not displayed and can not be placed on the stage.

Because of that, audio is not played, as well as WAV and MP3.

[RBeddig]

WMV is not officially supported. It often works but there is no guarantee for it. You can find the list of supported formats here:

https://www.dataton.com/watchout-overview-supported-media-images-sound-and-video

Regarding the audio files, it is sometimes hard to find the little speaker symbol or it is even not visible. You can still go into the cue settings and define the position in pixels or use the display name of the server which you want to use to send out audio though. This should work even if the little speaker symbol does not show up. Make sure that you define an audio output in the menu of the WATCHOUT screen on the display computer as well.

 

[FUM]

Thank you, RBeddig.

 I did not check it, so it was usable with the old version.

So, what is the most stable still image or movie file format?

Or how about with Alfa channel?

[Erik Rönnqvist]

As Rainer mentioned, stay away from WMV. A general recommendation is to avoid having video and audio in the same file. Whenever possible, use separate audio and video files for best results. 

It is hard to give a general recommendation for video formats, but generally the Hap family (Hap, HapQ or HapAlpha) work very well, although the files become quite large. Quality wise, Hap has somewhat limited color resolution but HapQ is good enough in most cases. If you can live with the large files, I would definitely recommend trying the Hap family. Please note that HapQ+Alpha is not yet supported in Watchout. If you want to run Hap and need alpha, you will have to stick to HapAlpha, which has the same image quality as Hap. 

H264 and MPEG-2 also work well, but need some care when encoding. If possible, don't use B-frames. B-frames are great when trying to maximise compression, but does increase the decoding complexity considerably, which can become an issue when trying to play many movies at the same time. If you are worried about the quality when encoding without B-frames, just bump up the bit rate by 10%. This will give you the same or slightly better quality, and the bitrate increase has very little impact on performance, compared to enabling B-frames. If you need to jump in timelines containing h264 or MPEG-2, it is also a good idea to keep the GOP size quite low. An I-frame distance of about 0.5-1 second is a good starting point, which translates into a GOP size of 15-30 for 30 fps video, and 30-60 for 60 fps video. 

If you need alpha, HapAlpha is likely the best choice, but you can also try Quicktime Animation, which has support for alpha. Support for Hap and Quicktime Animation is built into Watchout, so there is no need to install any Hap codecs or Quicktime for this to work. 

 

/Erik 

[FUM]

Hi, Erik.
Thank you for teaching me in detail.
I am using Adobe Media Encoder and it may be difficult to codec to Hap.
Because it does not correspond to Hap family.
So I will try it on H264.

[Walter]

7 hours ago, FUM said:

Hi, Erik.
Thank you for teaching me in detail.
I am using Adobe Media Encoder and it may be difficult to codec to Hap.
Because it does not correspond to Hap family.
So I will try it on H264.

Hi there. What do you mean with “it does not correspond to HAP family” ? 

I encode using AME all the time to hap. Just don’t forget to install the codec and it will be in the QT list of the encoder.