Other Media Player Functions

Media Speed

The playback speed can be set from 0 (Paused) to 400 (4x Speed).

|Note: The default speed of 100 may not fall onto a whole number for DMX personalities. See here for details|.

Pause on Dark

Pauses media playback when the layer level is set to zero.

Rewind on Dark

Sets the media play-head to the In-Point when the layer level is set to zero.

Interframe Blending

The media player will by default always render a new frame for each render loop of the engine. This means that if the engine is running at 60 frames per second (FPS) and the media player is playing 30 FPS content, it will interpolate every other frame by blending the two adjacent frames, a process called interframe blending. In most cases this is desirable; content will look smoother especially when played at slow speed. However, there are cases where interframe blending is not ideal, such as when media frame rate matches engine frame rate.

Interframe blending is controllable on each layer with a pin:

Performance Log

The media player contains two pins that show playback frame rate, frames dropped and frames skipped.

To use the log, drag two pins out of the pin tree onto a pinboard:

• Mix/Layer/Source/Mediaplayer/perflog
• Mix/Layer/Source/Mediaplayer/infooverlay
  

The Info overlay pin turns performance monitoring on, while the perflog string pin displays the results.

The data displayed from the performance log can be very informative.

The FPS shown in the perf log is the actual framerate of the media being played. Under normal conditions this framerate will match that of the media. If the the system is unable to render at full speed due to load, this framerate will begin to slow. The dropped frame and not rendered counters indicate how many frames were skipped or failed to render in time respectively. Skipping frames is a normal consequence of media having a faster framerate to the engine. (if media is played back at high speed or 60FPS content being played on a 50FPS output).

A small number of dropped or not rendered frames is normal especially during clip changes, speed changes or under timecode while scrubbing. Consistently increasing not rendered frames indicates the media player is unable to play every frame it should; which can lead to un-smooth playback.

If the media playback framerate is slower then the clip framerate, this is an indication that the system is saturating in playback capability. It is not always easy to determine the bottleneck for media playback as it depends on may factors including overall system load, codec, resolution and media drive speed. Most commonly, the CPU will saturate (indicated by 70% or higher utilisation as measured by task manager) or the media drive will be unable to upload data fast enough for rendering. CPU saturation can best be avoided by using FlexRes Performance wherever possible.