General Settings/Preferences

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Rendering
MIDI
Audio

Rendering Preferences

One of the benefits of Streamers, aside from its ability to work with any sequencer, is its customizability. While hardware streamer boxes limit you to a predefined look, Streamers allows you to tailor the appearance of your visual cues to suit your needs. Some customization options, such as the free-time clock and letterboxing, are set on a window-by-window basis. A number of global display options, however, are grouped together in the Rendering tab of Streamers Preferences.

Base Streamer Width and Base Punch Size

These settings, expressed as a proportion of the streamer window size, determine the width of a "regular" streamer and the diameter of a "regular" punch. Resizing a window will change the streamer widths proportionally to the window width, and will change the punch sizes to fit within both the width and height of the window.

"Small" and "Large" streamers and punches will be scaled from the corresponding base sizes, so they are also affected by the base streamer size and punch width settings. (See MIDI Triggers for more information.)

Opacity

This determines how opaque or transparent the streamers, punches, and free-time clock face are, allowing you to avoid totally obscuring the video underneath. Note that this does not affect the display of the background color (if Opaque Background is selected), letterboxing, or the second hand of the free-time clock, all of which are always fully opaque.

Latency Compensation

Different MIDI setups can have different amounts of latency, causing a slight delay in the triggering of streamers and punches. Streamers compensates by subtracting a fraction of a second from the length of streamer events and shifting the free-time clock by the same amount. This setting should not ordinarily need to be changed from the default.

Opaque Background

This option is useful in situations where streamers need to be overlaid onto an external video source using hardware chroma-keying.

Hide Main Streamers/Punches

This suppresses the primary display of visual events, for situations when the free-time clock is being used and only the streamers and punches integrated into the clock display are desired.

ADR-Style Streamers

By default, streamers are rendered in a way that is traditionally used for scoring applications (the streamer wipes all the way to the right edge of the screen, and ends with a punch). Checking ADR-Style Streamers will cause streamer events to wipe across to meet up with a gray bar near the right side of the screen instead. Note that ADR-style streamers can still end with or without a punch; this is controlled by a separate option (see below).

Punch at End of Streamers

Traditionally in scoring situations, each streamer ends with a single punch to emphasize the sync point with greater precision. This is Streamers's default behavior, but can be disabled with this option.

The popup button below this checkbox determines what color punches are triggered automatically at the end of each streamer. These punches are white by default, but can be also be set to gray, or to match the color of the associated streamer.

Always Show Frame on Startup

This checkbox will cause Streamers to launch with all preview frames already hidden, removing a step from the workflow for settings where the display setup never changes. If the streamer windows need to be moved later, the preview frames can always be shown again by selecting "Show Preview Frames" from the Display menu.

MIDI Preferences

In addition to the wide range of rendering options, Streamers also allows for detailed customization of MIDI events.

Listen to External MIDI Port

Streamers creates its own virtual MIDI endpoint to which sequencers can send MIDI data. By default, this is the only place Streamers will look for triggers. This option tells Streamers also to listen to a particular hardware MIDI port, or a virtual MIDI output from another application.

Treat MTC As

This option only applies to the free-time clock; if the clock is not being used, this will have no effect. Please see Using the Free-Time Clock for more information.

Triggers

The Triggers section of the MIDI Preferences is where you can change MIDI triggers and customize the events available for triggering. See MIDI Triggers for more information.

Audio Settings

The Audio Output selection allows you to choose any available CoreAudio device for beeps and clicks. You can either route audio to a single channel or to a stereo pair.

Beeps and Clicks

Here you can customize the pitch and volume of Streamers's beep events, as well as the volume of click events.

By default, the beep pitch is set to 1 kHz, and each individual beep is 1/30 second long (approx. 1 frame at 30fps). Beeps and clicks are always triggered at the volume you select here; they are not velocity-dependent.

Previous: Using the Free-Time Clock

Next: MIDI Triggers