Optimize Playback

MPlay can have a hard time maintaining real-time playback under certain conditions:

• The images are very large.

• The images are not at 8 bit fixed depth.

• A LUT and/or Gamma correction are applied to the image.

• The sequence is very long and does not fit into available memory.

You can use the following techniques to try to optimize playback speeds:

• Compress large image files if they support lossless compression, offloading some of the work from the drive to the CPU.

• Place the images on a fast drive, such as an Ultra-SCSI or RAID array.

• Do not load images over a network. Copy them to a local disk and play them from there.

• Only load color information if you don’t care about transparency. On the command line use the -c option. In MPlay, choose Windows > Preferences and set Load Components to Color Only.

• Load and display images as 8 bit. On the command line, use the -8 option.

  This strips off HDR information, so use it with care. Depth maps and normal maps do not display well with this option. Only use it to help realtime playback.

• Load the images at their natural depth, but display them as 8 bit. In MPlay, choose Windows > Display Options, click the Video Card Options button on the Display tab, and turn on Display all Images at 8bit. This preserves HDR information when you use color correction.

• Bake Gamma into your LUTs.

• Load the image sequence at ½ res or lower. Use the controls in the menu bar to set the proxy size.