Paul Moran
February 17th, 2003, 04:24 PM
http://www.vfxtalk.com/newsimages/fcreview.jpg (http://www.vfxtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=232)
Arvid Björn, our resident Shake moderator and all round VFX guru, has put together a mini review of Iridas' new FrameCycler Professional for Uncompressed film resolution playback at your workstation...
Iridas FrameCycler Pro (http://www.iridas.com/framecycler/)
Working with video and film without any dedicated hardware for playback can be frustrating, and one often relies on loading previews into ram with their 2D application of choice (which itself can hog a lot of ram and shortens your time resolution), or the flipbook that came with your 3D application for instance. But this is just for a quick preview.
What about when you have 2k of material that needs to be seen in motion, are you going to wait for it to be plotted to film? Will you downsample it to 601 spatial resolution? Neither is very tempting.
FrameCycler may be the answer to a bit of this problem! The thought of being able to quickly load a sequence, with sound, into ram and play it fullscreen at full resolution if very appealing, FrameCycler doesn't stop at that however, it will let you combine multiple sources of footage for a preliminary composite, viewed at various colorspaces including HSV, YUV and Lab. You can quickly switch to fullscreen mode, and you can easily pan around and zoom with popular shortcuts like numpad +/- and the middle mouse button. In- and out-points can be set to limit the playback to certain frames, you can downsample the image to increase the time resolution of your precious ram. Playing 2k images requires a fast fillrate from your graphics card, although it's very useful to get near 24fps playback of 2k right on your desktop!
However, It's suprisingly fast when you zoom in and pan around with 601 resolution images, even while it's playing. It will take advantage of dual CPU systems, appearently it dedicates one CPU for playback and one for pre-caching. Iridas call their buffering technique ILAP, Intelligent Look-Ahead Playback, you can see how the cached frames always struggle to be where you want them to be, similar to AfterFX you get a little stripe just above the timeline that represents which frames or which part of the sequence is currenly cached in ram, it keeps changing back and forth as you scroll around the sequence, so it's not your average brute-force take-it-or-leave-it flipbook.
FrameCycler doesn't only support sequences of frames of various formats, but indeed all kinds of movie and streaming formats. For example, if you ever tried to study a DivX movie in detail frame-by-frame you'll notice that the format is obviously made for being played forwards, and doesnt allow scrubbing very well. However with FrameCycler you can do this, because it stores the frames in ram, so it's not played off of the disk like we're used to.
There is a more advanced side to FrameCycler as well. You can launch FrameCycler from a commandline, and thus you are able to create quick batch scripts to automate a lot of tasks. You also have access to timecodes if you provide the framerate. Furthermore, FrameCycler supports lookup tables, or LUT's from various compositing packages including Shake, which is very interesting, and a great way to do accurate preliminary composites with predefined color corrections for a mock-up preview, which you quickly export to an MPEG-1 or Quicktime movie straight out of FrameCycler if needed. FrameCycler supports a lot of export formats, which is great for a quick conversion, or a quick render to file.
This is a great allround tool for viewing or previewing all kinds of sequences, and is specifcally aimed at the professional digital content creators which are not only interested in the obvious visual information, but specific colorchannels or displaying modes. In essense it is a tool that will save you time.
Iridas FrameCycler Pro (http://www.iridas.com/framecycler/)
Arvid Björn (http://www.vfxtalk.com/about.php#arvid)
Arvid Björn, our resident Shake moderator and all round VFX guru, has put together a mini review of Iridas' new FrameCycler Professional for Uncompressed film resolution playback at your workstation...
Iridas FrameCycler Pro (http://www.iridas.com/framecycler/)
Working with video and film without any dedicated hardware for playback can be frustrating, and one often relies on loading previews into ram with their 2D application of choice (which itself can hog a lot of ram and shortens your time resolution), or the flipbook that came with your 3D application for instance. But this is just for a quick preview.
What about when you have 2k of material that needs to be seen in motion, are you going to wait for it to be plotted to film? Will you downsample it to 601 spatial resolution? Neither is very tempting.
FrameCycler may be the answer to a bit of this problem! The thought of being able to quickly load a sequence, with sound, into ram and play it fullscreen at full resolution if very appealing, FrameCycler doesn't stop at that however, it will let you combine multiple sources of footage for a preliminary composite, viewed at various colorspaces including HSV, YUV and Lab. You can quickly switch to fullscreen mode, and you can easily pan around and zoom with popular shortcuts like numpad +/- and the middle mouse button. In- and out-points can be set to limit the playback to certain frames, you can downsample the image to increase the time resolution of your precious ram. Playing 2k images requires a fast fillrate from your graphics card, although it's very useful to get near 24fps playback of 2k right on your desktop!
However, It's suprisingly fast when you zoom in and pan around with 601 resolution images, even while it's playing. It will take advantage of dual CPU systems, appearently it dedicates one CPU for playback and one for pre-caching. Iridas call their buffering technique ILAP, Intelligent Look-Ahead Playback, you can see how the cached frames always struggle to be where you want them to be, similar to AfterFX you get a little stripe just above the timeline that represents which frames or which part of the sequence is currenly cached in ram, it keeps changing back and forth as you scroll around the sequence, so it's not your average brute-force take-it-or-leave-it flipbook.
FrameCycler doesn't only support sequences of frames of various formats, but indeed all kinds of movie and streaming formats. For example, if you ever tried to study a DivX movie in detail frame-by-frame you'll notice that the format is obviously made for being played forwards, and doesnt allow scrubbing very well. However with FrameCycler you can do this, because it stores the frames in ram, so it's not played off of the disk like we're used to.
There is a more advanced side to FrameCycler as well. You can launch FrameCycler from a commandline, and thus you are able to create quick batch scripts to automate a lot of tasks. You also have access to timecodes if you provide the framerate. Furthermore, FrameCycler supports lookup tables, or LUT's from various compositing packages including Shake, which is very interesting, and a great way to do accurate preliminary composites with predefined color corrections for a mock-up preview, which you quickly export to an MPEG-1 or Quicktime movie straight out of FrameCycler if needed. FrameCycler supports a lot of export formats, which is great for a quick conversion, or a quick render to file.
This is a great allround tool for viewing or previewing all kinds of sequences, and is specifcally aimed at the professional digital content creators which are not only interested in the obvious visual information, but specific colorchannels or displaying modes. In essense it is a tool that will save you time.
Iridas FrameCycler Pro (http://www.iridas.com/framecycler/)
Arvid Björn (http://www.vfxtalk.com/about.php#arvid)