A HAP(py) Week + Cue Numbers
Hello All,
It's been a dense couple of weeks. Xenia Leydel – producer of the Werkstatt and director of the TroikaTronix HQ – was on holiday for over two weeks. (Many thanks to @crystalhorizon who took on most of the order processing and inquires during that time.) In addition, I was back in my hometown of Omaha, Nebraska for a week to help out my mother and siblings after my father had an operation on his knee. (He's doing well, thank you.) Still, while jetting around the globe and managing non-programming tasks, I managed to get a good amount of work done. (I actually love 8 hour plane rides, because they are one most productive times. No interruptions!)
HAP Fixes/Improvements
With that as the background, the majority of my energy since my last post has been spent on HAP. First, there were some bugs with the current HAP implementation in Windows – notably, if you attempted to play more than 75 clips (even if they are one after the other) Isadora would crash. Additionally, high resolution movies sometimes suffered from flickering artifact. So, about a week of my time was solving all of this, and it now seems fixed. This effort is really important. I've gotten some incredibly positive reports from @Fred who did a massive show, with high resolution clips, and performance was through the roof on his souped up PC. In the end, Isadora performed perfectly for 20+ shows. It's clear that, for the absolute best performance, HAP is the way to go, especially when running under Windows.
The next few days were spent on another important HAP development: I now have HAP playback working natively in AVFoundation. Previously Isadora would only play HAP movies using QuickTime. The selection of the playback engine of this happens "behind your back," as long as the 'optimize' input is set to 'performance. Isadora will generally use AVFoundation when the 'optimize' mode is 'performance. But, if you try to play a clip that AVFoundation doesn't support (the Animation, for instance) it falls back to QuickTime. You can tell which "engine" is being used by looking at the 'pb engine' output of the Movie Player. AV = AVFoundation, and QT = QuickTime.
In the past, Isadora fell back to QuickTime for HAP movies. But no longer. Now they play in AVFoundation and it works great.
Enhancements for Movies with Alpha Channels
I also put quite a bit of effort finishing up issues brought up by @dbengali and in this post and @Woland in this post. You can read about the alpha issues in my previous entry. I 've added a new 'alpha mode' input on the Movie Player that allows you to specify whether the movie is 'straight alpha' (unpremultiplied) or premultiplied so that Isadora can handle either one. The team is now going through all the actors to ensure that they work as expected when the alpha is in either format.
A Long Requested Feature: Cue Numbers
Finally, the last couple of days were spent on a long requested feature: Cue Numbers in Isadora. Here's a little preview:
We have some questions about how this feature should work, given that light boards (the usual model for the cue number feature requests) don't have cut/copy/paste/drag. How do you handle the cue numbers when you start doing stuff like this? (NOTE: please don't comment on that here... if necessary, we'll start a thread on the forum for your feedback.)
That's it for now. We're still checking out Isadora's performance with High Sierra. I've got one thing to investigate there, but generally it seems OK.
Best Wishes,
Mark
