Video

Resolume supports a lot of video formats. 

Can Resolume play my videos?

That's a simple question. 
The answer gets complex real quick, and depends on how technical you want to get.

Let's start with the simple answer: 

On Mac and Windows, Resolume supports: 

  • .MOV files
  • .AVI files
  • .GIF files
  • .MP4 files.
  • .MPG and .MPEG files

So if your file is in one of these extensions, you're good.

Of course is is never as easy as that. 
The file extension says a something, but not everything about the file. 
The extension says nothing about which 'codec' is used. 
And as it turns out, the codec is actually the most important part when playing back video files.

So let's complicate things a little: If your system's video player can play the file, so can Resolume. 

The rule of thumb is: If your file opens and plays in Windows' Movies & TV app or Apple's Quicktime, it will play in Resolume. This means we support most common codecs, like h264.

If you need to use VLC or some weird codec pack to play your file then it's likely that Resolume can't play your file. If Resolume can't play your file, it'll display it with a big yellow X in its preview.

Tip! If you have trouble playing a file, converting it to DXV is always, always, always the answer to your problem. Need help with that? Read all about converting your content.

#Nerd alert!

Now if you're a bit technical minded, you probably want to know the nitty gritty about which codecs are supported. If you're just here for playing cool videos and actually have a social life, skip ahead.

When Resolume opens a file, it first tries to open it by itself. 
When the file is DXV or PhotoJPEG encoded, we use our own player. 
This means you get hardware accelerated lightning fast playback with DXV, and turbo fast playback on Photo-JPEG. GIFs are also played back by our own engine. And as a cherry on top, we also play back Apple ProRes files on PC.

If Resolume doesn't recognise the format or codec, we pass it to the big boss, your computer's operating system. On Windows, we ask MediaFoundation. On Mac, we ask AVFoundation. We ask them kindly if they can play the file. If they can, we let them handle it for us and just display the frames we get back.

If all that fails, we finally ask FFMPEG if they recognise what's going on and if they can make sense of it. 

Unfortunately this doesn't mean that we support the full range of codecs that VLC supports. The licensing for FFMPEG is actually very complex, and unless you're an open source product like VLC, you are not allowed to just play all the codecs. When you stick to these rules, there are limits to FFMPEG. And we like to play by the rules.

Playback

Resolume provides many ways of controlling how videos behave.
This behaviour can be controlled from the transport section of the clip panel. 

Timeline

The first thing we will look at in the Transport section is the timeline itself. We can manipulate this directly by grabbing the blue pointer that moves along it and sliding it around. This gives an effect similar to DJ scratching.

In and Out Points

The smaller bar below the timeline is also useful. Grab and move the small blue pointers at its end to set the In and Out points of the clip. This is great for selecting parts of longer clips to use.

Tip! After setting in and out points, hold down Shift while dragging the range. This will let you move the range around, while keeping the length the same.

Time / Time Remaining

In the top right, you can see the clip's current time. Clicking on this number will switch to show you the remaining time.

Speed

You have direct control over the Speed of the clip. You use the Speed slider to make the clip go faster or slower. This is great for ramping the playback speed up and down during your live show.

The Speed slider has a non-linear response. This is a fancy way of saying that you have more precision in the values between 0 and 2, where you most likely want to adjust the values more accurately. When you go towards 10, it ramps up more quickly because that's when you probably want things to flyyyyyyy!

Duration

You can also get precise by setting the exact Duration of how long a clip should play. Let's say you need a clip to last exactly 8 seconds. Simply enter 8 as the duration and Resolume will do the math for you and adjust the playback speed so the clip will last exactly 8 seconds. Regardless of how long or short it was originally.

Note that this doesn't affect the Speed slider! So you still have the same range to improvise live over the new duration.

Gotcha! Note that when shortening the clip via the In and Out points, the Duration will be adjusted to match the new length. Vice versa, when you change the Duration directly, the In and Out points will not be adjusted. That might sound weird when you first read this. Just use it a few times, and you'll see it makes the most sense from a practical point of view.

BPM Sync

There is another very powerful way to control the speed of a clip. You can switch to it by the drop down at the top right of the Transport section. It's called BPM Sync and it's awesome.

By switching the transport mode to BPM Sync, Resolume will use the global BPM to control the speed of the clip. You can read all about BPM in its own chapter. For now, let's assume you have Resolume running at the perfect BPM, perfectly in time with the DJ. Now all clips that have their transport mode set to BPM Sync will play at a speed that synchronises them with that BPM.

In order for BPM Synced clips to work right, you will need to set the number of beats that the clip spans in the Transport section. By default, Resolume will guess the right amount of beats for you based on the length of the clip. It will guess to the nearest power of 2, so it will set the clip to 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 etc beats for you. Of course, you can click the number and change it, use the + and - buttons or use the *2 and /2 buttons to quickly multiply or divide the value by 2.

Speed

When in BPM Sync mode, you still have access to a Speed modifier. This is so you can ramp a clip up and down smoothly just like when set to Timeline. The only difference is that the BPM Sync Speed is quantised to multiples of 2. So you can ramp a clip from 0, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 1, 2, 4, 8 to 16 times as fast.

Because you got to stay locked to that beat, yo.

SMPTE & Denon

On Arena, videos can also be set to SMPTE or Denon. Those playmodes are useful for syncing to a DJ set or show moment. You can dive down the SMPTE rabbit hole here, while you can read more about Denon here.

Playback Options

The Transport section also provides some additional options:

Direction

Use these buttons to set the clip to play forwards or backwards, or pause the clip. Time is a fluid construct in Resolume and this is how you control it.

Playmode

Use these buttons to control how the clip plays.

Loop

The default mode is to loop, which will just start the clip from the beginning and continue playing for ever and ever and ever. 

Ping Pong

The second option is to ping pong, which means it plays alternately forwards and backwards. Ping pong is a cheap way to avoid a visible cut on footage that doesn't actually loop.

Random

Next is Random. The Random button can be used to jump to random points in your video. 

Setting playmode to Random will reveal a few extra options. 

Speed and Duration are still the same controls as before.

Interval controls how often the playhead will jump to a new random point. Lower values mean more jumping, higher values less jumping.

Distance controls the range from which a random point will be picked. Lower values mean the playhead will only make short jumps, resulting in a subtle glitchy look. Higher values mean it will jump across the whole timeline, resulting in more abrupt jump cuts.

Just like Speed and Duration, Interval and Distance are measured in seconds or in beats, depending on which mode you're in.

Such random. Much wow.

Play Once and Eject

Next is play-once-and-eject. You can use this for 'one shot' samples that you want to punch in at the right time.

Play Once and Hold

The play-once-and-hold mode is pretty much the same, except it will hold the last frame of the clip when it's done playing. This is very useful for stuff like logo reveals and DJ intros.

Playmode Away

These buttons decide what happens when a clip is triggered when you've been away from it for a bit.

The first option plays the clip from the start. This is the default option and most of the time, it's what you want.

The second option, "pick-up", starts the clip from wherever it was when it was last played. This is useful for cutting between longer clips that are part of a larger narrative.

The third option, "relative pick-up", will start the clip at the same relative position the previously played clip was at. I don't really know what you would use this playmode for. Bart really loves it because Resolume 2 had it and he used it with crash test footage of different cars, and he could change cars mid crash or something. I guess that must have been like pretty cool. Back in 2002. Like, whatever.

Tip! So, people smarter than myself have figured out that this relative pick-up is actually really useful as a backup during SMPTE playback. The idea is you have two copies of the clip. One is set to SMPTE playback, the other to regular timeline and relative pick-up. Should the SMPTE signal unexpectedly drop out, you can switch to the copy. It will pick up where the SMPTE clip was and nobody will have noticed what happened. Shows how much I know.

Cue Points

You can use the Cue Points section to quickly jump to any part of the clip that you like.

To set a cue point, click the smaller part to the left of one of the cue point buttons. The part you click will turn blue. If you have a keyboard shortcut assigned to the cue point, it will turn white. This means the cue point is ready for use.

Now you can click the main button (or press the relevant keyboard key) to jump straight to the point where you set the cue point.

Tip! When you try to trigger a cue point that's not set yet, Resolume will use the current playhead time as the cue. So you can set your cue points while playing, without interrupting your flow.

If you want to set cue points precisely, a good way to do it is to pause the clip, drag the Transport timeline marker to where you want the cue point and then set it.

You can overwrite an existing cue point in exactly the same way as setting it for the first time. Resetting a cue point to be empty is not really possible. Mostly because we're not sure how that would work or what it would be useful for.

Beat Looper

When a video is set to 'BPM Sync', the Beat Looper section will be displayed. This enables you to have Resolume automatically loop sections of the clip. This is great for adding climaxes, creating weird vocal combinations or all kinds of other effects.

To use it, just select one of the options - the clip will loop over the relevant number of beats. When you are done, just click the selected option again or the Off button. It's really that simple!

With 'Catch Up' active, turning the Beat looper off will continue playback where the playhead would have been if you hadn't used the Beat looper. Otherwise, it will just continue wherever the playhead was.

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