Frequently Asked Questions

Operation

What's with the translucent blue overlay?

This is just a preview frame so that you can place the streamer window appropriately. Once it is in place, hit P or select Window -> Show/Hide Preview Frames.

How can I make the streamer window full-screen?

Double-clicking on the preview frame will expand the streamer window to fill the current screen. Note that Streamers does not "capture" the screen; all other applications continue to draw on the screen, but with the overlay window on top.

Performance

Does Streamers work with <hardware name here>?

Streamers does not work with DV boxes, MJPEG-A cards, or other video adapter devices that take a direct stream of video data. There are three basic reasons:

Overlaying events on these devices would involve altering the actual video data coming from the sequencer, which at best risks stability problems.
It would also involve decompressing, processing, and recompressing each frame—which is an unreasonable demand for a mission-critical record rig.
Streamers can work without any video at all; it can render over application windows or any other content. Outputting to DV hardware would not allow this flexibility.

If you have any doubts about your specific hardware, go to System Preferences and select the Displays pane. If your device shows up there, and you can drag windows onto its screen, Streamers will work with it.

Does Streamers work with <sequencing software here>?

The short answer: Yes!

The longer answer: If your sequencer is running on the same Mac as Streamers, it should be perfectly compatible. If it's on a separate computer, you'll need to set up a MIDI connection between the two and select the second machine as an external MIDI input to Streamers. In that case, though, you won't be able to overlay on top of a video window.

Addendum to the longer answer: A few sequencers, such as Ableton Live, cannot output MIDI timecode, and are therefore incompatible with Streamers's free-time clock. However, MTC is not needed for any other functions, and Streamers's other events work great with Live!

Why do my streamers seem choppy?

Streamers uses Core Video to synchronize its drawing to screen updates. Because Mac OS X is not a real-time operating system, Streamers has no way to guarantee that the system will give it a chance to redraw at every vertical refresh interval. Since the effective redraw rate varies widely from one setup to another (depending on video card and processor speed, among other factors), it is important to test Streamers on the rig where it will be used.

If you are experiencing more performance issues that you would expect from your hardware, try a few things to see where the problem may lie:

Try different video codecs (such as H.264, MPEG-4), compression settings, and resolutions to see if your system has an easier time with some configurations.
Try working with an empty sequence in your sequencer. Sometimes performance issues come down to too much audio processing on other high-priority threads.
If your sequencer is recording audio while Streamers is running, try working in playback mode instead. Streamers often works best on a second rig slaved to timecode from the record rig.

Licensing and Activation

Can I install Streamers on a backup machine?

Yes; the end-user license agreement allows for a second installation in certain circumstances, including for a backup machine. Please select Streamers -> License Agreement... for more information.

Is my organization eligible for a discount?

If you are a student, faculty or staff at an educational institution and you plan to use Streamers for academic purchases, yes! Please contact support@figure53.com for information on educational discounts.

Miscellaneous

What if I have other questions?

Please contact support@figure53.com and we'll be happy to help you however we can.

Thanks for using Streamers!

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