User manual

Table Of Contents
676
Video
Playing back video
To set up a video output device, proceed as follows:
1. Open the Devices Menu and select “Device Setup…” to open the Device Setup
dialog, and select the Video Player page.
2. In the Active column, activate the checkbox for the device that you want to use for
playing back video.
All devices in your system that are capable of playing back video are listed. The
Onscreen Window device serves for playing back the video file on your computer
monitor. For further information on output devices, see the section
“Video output
devices” on page 671.
3. From the pop-up menu in the Format column, select an output format.
For the Onscreen Window output, only a “fixed” format is available. For the other
output devices, you can select different output formats for playback depending on
the device.
4. Adjust the Offset setting to compensate for processing delays.
Due to delays while processing video, the video image may not match with the
audio in Cubase. By using the Offset parameter, you can compensate for this
effect. The Offset value indicates how many milliseconds the video will be
delivered earlier in order to compensate for the processing time of the video
material. Each hardware setup can have different processing delays, so you must
try out different values to determine which value is appropriate.
Ö The Offset value can be set individually for each output device. It is saved globally for
each output device and is independent of the project.
Ö The offset is only used during playback. It is defeated in stop and scrub mode so that
you always see the correct video frame.
If the quality of the video image is not a critical factor or if you are experiencing
performance problems, try lowering the value on the Video Quality pop-up menu.
Although higher quality settings make the video display sharper and smoother,
they also lead to an increased processor load.
Improving video performance
Sometimes, video problems, such as stutters during playback, are caused by codecs
that do not support multi-threading. This can be the case for video files that use
single-threaded decoding, such as Motion-JPEG, Photo-JPEG, and QuickTime DV
codecs. These types of video files are typically created when capturing video with
Decklink/AJA cards.
To compensate for this, you can activate the Boost Video (formance) option on the
Video Player page in the Device Setup dialog. This excludes one of the available CPU
cores from audio processing and reserves it for video tasks like decoding and
playback. However, this may reduce the audio performance.
Playing back video on the computer screen
The Video Player window is used for playing back video on your computer screen.
To open the Video Player window, open the Devices menu and select the “Video
Player” option.
!
For this option to have an effect, you must also activate the Multi Processing option in
the Device Setup dialog (VST Audio System page).