Preparing Media
While Resolume is designed to get you up and running quickly, if you are serious about live audio visual performance then you should really take some steps to get the most out of your computer and your content.
Installation
The nature of audio-visual performance is that it needs as much processing power as possible, especially if you want to mix lots of layers, apply loads of audio and video effects and work on a high resolution.
While software like internet firewalls, virus checkers, desktop utilities and so on are really useful for day to day use, they do consume computer resources and you do not need them running during a performance.
For maximum stability and performance, the best thing to do is to have more than one installation of Windows or OSX on your computer, with one set up with the bare minimum of software running. You can then boot into your stripped down, high performance OS when you want to perform with Resolume.
If you don't want to create a separate installation for performance, the next best thing is to set up a user account that is set up to run less software at startup. This is not as good as a completely separate installation, but it will help.
To manage users in Windows, open Control Panel from the Start menu, and then double click User Accounts. Make sure that the User account you create also has Administrator rights!
To manage users in Mac OSX you open the Accounts settings in the System Preferences.
Codecs
Do not install codec packs like the K-Lite Codec Pack. They install a lot of codecs and utilities that can cause more harm than good. Only install the codecs that you actually use.
The next section has loads of advice on what codec to use.
Preparing Media
Choosing how to encode your content is critical in audio-visual performance. You do this by choosing a 'codec'. This stands for COmpressor/DECompressor. Your choice of codec determines how much processor time is used to decompress each video frame. This in turn will determine how many layers of smoothly playing video you can use and how many effects you can apply.
Use DXV!
For the very best performance in Resolume you should use the Resolume DXV codec. It is by far the fastest codec because Resolume can decompress the video frames on the GPU instead of the CPU.
Separate Audio and Video!
We highly recommend rendering the audio and video in separate files and joining them together in a clip in Avenue instead of rendering a video file that also contains audio.
Keeping the audio and video in separate files is better for your work-flow. If you want to change the audio of a clip and not the video you only have to re-save the audio file instead of rendering the entire video file with the audio again.
The audio and video is often created using different software, sometimes even by different people. By combining the audio and video files in Avenue you can create the music in your favourite audio software and create the video in your video app of choice.
There is another problem with including audio in video files - it limits the BPMs that can be used. When rendering a video file with audio, the length of the file is quantized to the number of frames of the video. This makes it impossible for audio to loop seamlessly at certain tempos.
For example, using PAL video format at 25 frames per second, it is not possible to create a one bar AV loop at 90BPM that will loop perfectly. The closest we can get is a 66 frame long clip, but that will actually be at around 90.9 BPM
Avenue transposes the video to the length of the audio in a clip to create a perfectly looping audio visual clip.
Audio Compression
Don't compress audio. Period. Don't do it.
Save it to an uncompressed (linear PCM) .wav file. Avenue needs very fast access to the audio data, leaving it uncompressed enables this. Uncompressed audio files are relatively small compared to uncompressed video files so reducing the file size with compression is not necessary.
In most cases using a sample rate of 44,100 kHz and a bit depth of 16 bit is fine.