GRID2 Manual - The Media Grid
From VidvoxWiki
| GRID2 Manual |
|---|
| The Media Grid |
| Other Playback Settings |
| Sets |
| Preferences |
| FAQ |
Contents |
File Loading and Management
Loading movies-
1. Loading Multiple Files
You can load an entire folder of media by selecting “Add Folder” from the File menu. This will bring up an open dialog asking you to locate the folder you wish to load. Once you have selected a folder, a loading screen will come up and GRID2 will begin loading your media into the GRID. If you wish to stop the loading process, click the cancel button in the load-ing window. Can- celing the load process will stop GRID2 from loading more files, but will not erase the ones it has already suc- cessfully loaded. You can also drag multiple files in from the Finder at the same time. When dragging in multiple files from the Finder, the files will load in sequentially starting from the cell you drop the files onto.
Dragging a folder from the Finder will cause GRID2 to load all the files in that folder starting at the cell your dropped the folder onto.
2. Loading Individual Files
Selecting "Add Movie" from the file menu will open a standard dialog box to select a movie to load into the next available cell.
Double clicking on an tempty cell will bring up an open file dialog box. Just find the file you wish to load and click open. The file will load into the selected cell in the GRID. You can also drag files in from the Finder, either one at a time. Bringing in files from the Finder will overwrite any already loaded cells.
Moving cells-
Around If you shift+click on a movie in the GRID you can drag it to a new location. This is such an important addition to GRID2 that I’m making all this text bold and italic.
Faster File Loading vs. Faster Triggering-
By default GRID2 will load the first few frames of each movie loaded into RAM. This is called pre-roll. Pre-rolling makes instantaneous triggering possible as it nor- mally takes your computer a fraction of a second to find the file on your hard drive and then start reading. For a movie file that has been pre-rolled, GRID2 will play the first few frames that are loaded into RAM during the few milliseconds of seek time. Pre-rolling clips also improves moving looping. However, pre-rolling can add a considerable amount of time during the loading process. If you need to load files quickly, you can disable pre-rolling by turn-ing off Fast Loading in the General Set- tings section of the Preferences window. Dragging files in from the finder works in MacOS X 10.2 (Jaguar) but does not yet work in MacOS X 10.3 (Panther).
RAM Loading Files Loading a movie into RAM allows for incredibly fast access to any frame. You can load a movie into by option+clicking on it. Additionally, you can put the tag (RAM) into the name of the movie and GRID2 will know to ramload these movies. This will make scrubbing and looping backwards much more responsive.
Playing Files from the GRID
There are three ways to trigger movies in GRID2 - mouse, keyboard, or MIDI notes.
Mouse Clicking-
The easiest way to play a file in GRID2 is to simply click on its thumbnail in the GRID.
QWERTY Keyboard-
The grid is divided into 12 columns and 12 rows. Each row contains either 12 or 8 clips (the last four rows only have 8 clips each to make room for the pre-view window). To trigger a clip, simply move to the row the clip is loaded into using the number keys, then select the column using the QWERTY row. For example, if you wanted to play the clip in row 4 column 3, you would press 4 then E. You can also change rows using the up and down arrow keys.
MIDI-
GRID2 can map MIDI notes directly to cells loaded into the media grid. By default, note 0 will trigger the first cell.
Stopping Playback-
At anytime you can hit the escape key to stop all movie playback and cut to black
Clearing the GRID
To clear the entire GRID and start over, select New Set from the edit menu. To clear only the playing movie select Clear Cell from the Cell menu.
Progress Bar and Scrubbing
The Progress Bar is used to display information about the currently playing movie. On the right hand side of the Progress Bar is the total length of the currently playing clip (in the form of hour:minute:second:frame). On the left hand side is the current time within the clip. The current position relative to the total length of the clip is displayed by an orange diamond in the scrub bar.
Clicking on the Progress Bar
The Progress Bar can also be used to jump to a particular location in a file. Simply click on the Progress Bar to jump to that loca-tion in the clip. Clicking on the bar and holding down will cause you to scrub through the file until you let up on the mouse button.
Mouse Jump-to
You can also use the horizontal position of the mouse to jump within a file by hitting the “;” key on the keyboard. When using the mouse jump-to feature, the left side of your screen represents the beginning of your clip and the right side of the screen represents the end of the clip.
Mouse Scrubbing
Clicking on the scrub button to the left of the Progress Bar activates Mouse Scrub- bing. You can also turn on mouse scrubbing from the Settings menu or by pressing the “L” key. There are two scrub modes, you can choose between them in the settings menu:
- Relative scrub mode - In this mode moving the mouse forward will cause the video to advance by 1 frame per pixel. Moving the mouse backwards will cause the video to go backwards by 1 frame per pixel. In relative scrub mode, if you reach the end of the screen the mouse will automatically jump back to the middle of the screen, allowing you to have an endless scrub bar.
- Absolute scrub mode - This mode is similar to using the mouse jump-to func- tion. The left side of your screen represents the beginning of your clip and the right side of the screen represents the end of your clips. In both scrub modes the vertical position of the mouse controls the polling frequency (try scrubbing near the top and bottom of the screen to see the difference). In quantized polling mode your polling interval is determined by the BPM in the clock and the selected division instead of the vertical mouse position. For more on quantization see the section on the clock below.
Using In and Out Points
You can select part of a movie to loop by setting in and out points with the “G” and “H” keys respectively. Pressing these keys while playing with immediately restrict the playback to the new in and out points. The little triangles on the bottom of the scrub slider show where the in and out points are. Holding down shift and pressing “G” or “H” resets the in and out points. You can remove all the in and outpoints from all the movies in GRID by pressing option+x. You can also click and drag the in and outpoints with your mouse. The triangles that indicated the in and out points with highlight when the mouse is correctly positioned to adjust them. To place the in and out points exactly try pausing the movie and dragging to the frame you want to set as an in/out point and then press the “G” or “H” key.
Speed Slider
The speed slider indicates the current playback speed. It has a range of -4 to 4, where 0 is paused and 1 is normal playback. Clicking on the speed slider will change the playback speed to the selected value. Clicking on the numbers just below the speed slider will jump to those exact speeds.
Mouse Jog
Clicking the button to the left of the speed slider will activate Mouse Jog. In this mode, the vertical position of the mouse will control the playback speed. At the top of the screen the playback speed will be 4x and at the very bottom the speed will be -4x. When turning on Mouse Jog, your mouse will jump to the location on the screen needed to play clips at your current speed. For instance, if you are at a speed of 0 and turn Mouse Jog on, your mouse will jump to the middle of the screen. You can also control the speed with your QWERTY keyboard. The “J” key resets the speed to 1x (normal speed), conveniently located next to the Mouse Jog key “K”. The bottom row of keys on your keyboard (Z, X, C, V, etc.) are -4x, -2x, -1x, -.5x, 0x, .5x, 1x, 2x, and 4x respectively.
Pausing movies
Tapping the spacebar will cause pause to toggle on and off. Holding down on the spacebar will cause the pause button to be momentary and playback will resume upon release.
Volume Slider
The volume slider adjusts the overall loudness.
Pressing the "mute" button to the left of the volume slider will mute GRID2. While mute is on, changing the volume will have no effect on audio output. Turning mute off will cause the volume to return to the level displayed on the volume slider.
Fade-time / Fade Button
Clicking the fade button will cause the video output to fade to black. You can also fade to black by holding down on shift and pressing the escape key. Once faded out, you can return to video either by using the same key stroke, clicking the fade button again, or by triggering a clip.
The Auto-fade time slider allows you to adjust the amount of it will take to fade completely to black. The range is from 0 seconds (instantaneous) to 300 frames (10 seconds at 30 frames per second).
BPM, Quantization, and MIDI slave
BPM
Shows the beats per minute of the clock. You can adjust the BPM by clicking the TAP button next to the BPM number (GRID2 will take the average time between your first four clicks to estimate the BPM). Tapping the “return” key is the same as clicking the TAP button. You can also click and drag the BPM number display to change the value. The large numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 indi- cate which quarter-note the clock is on. Clicking on any of these numbers will immediately reset the clock to the first beat (quarter note) of the measure (in other words, click this area on the downbeat). The smaller numbers to the right keep track of the current 1/16th note.
Quantization Once you have set the BPM, you will want to select a division to work at from the Quantization menu. This selection will set the timing and duration for each of the quantization modes. Grid lets you choose between divisions as large as 8 bars and as small as 16th notes.
Quantization Modes in GRID2:
- Quantized Triggering - Triggering of clips is delayed until the next division marker. When active, triggering the same clip twice will over-ride this feature and play the movie immediately.
- Quantized Re-triggering - Starts the current movie over again every time the clock division occurs.
- Quantized Polling - When quantized polling is active, the clock divsion is used for the polling interval for mouse scrubbing and the vertical position of the mouse is ignored.
- Quantized Scrubbing - When active, scrub locations will automatically snap to the nearest division.
Syncing to a MIDI clock source
GRID can slave to an external software or hardware MIDI clock source such. First select the MIDI port (or virtual port via CoreMIDI) you wish to receive MIDI clock information on in the GRID2 preferences. Then start the external clock. GRID2 should automatically receive a "start" message which will switch the G2 clock into Slave mode (the word SLAVE should appear near the BPM in the G2 interface). To get out of slave mode, you can click on the word SLAVE in the G2 interface, or simply stop the external MIDI clock.
Loop Modes
The four buttons in the bottom right of the Grid interface each represent a different loop mode. Clicking on these buttons will switch the active loop-mode. You can also change the active loop-mode using the a, s, d, and f keys respectively.
Loop Modes in GRID2:
- Forward loop - In this mode, movies will play forwards and loop when they reach the end of the clip. This is the default loop-mode.
- Reversing loop - In this mode, movies will play backwards and loop when they reach the beginning of the clip.
- Palindromic loop - In this mode, movies will play forwards until it reaches the end of the clip, at which point it will play backwards until it reaches the beginning of the clip and starts all over again
- Play once - In this mode, GRID2 will play the selected clip once then either cut to black, start playing a random clip, play the next clip in the GRID or do nothing at all.
Tapping a loop-mode key will cause the selected mode to toggle between on and Forward Loop, while holding it down will cause it to be switch back to Forward loop when you release the key.