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Frequenctly Asked Questions

Make sure you don't miss the tips+ticks section within the help files.

What is AnimPlayer?

AnimPlayer is an advanced image sequence playback program specially designed for CG needs of feature film and post production. It is the perfect replacement for

  • Maya - FCheck
  • Softimage / Shake - Flipbook
  • 3ds max - RAM Player
  • AfterEffects - RAM Preview
  • Nuke - Viewer

AnimPlayer boosts your workflow and productivity at low costs and comes which a rich feature set including:

  • judder free tv field playback with real time field order swapping
  • maximum image format up to 8192 x 4096 pixels*
  • full real-time of 1080 i+p HD TV, 2k and 4k*
  • full support of all HDR color image formats
    with advanced color controls for OpenEXR and Cineon | DPX
  • individual real time alpha-, red, green, blue and luminance channel display
  • tv-color preview using hardware accelerated YUV 4:2:2 colorspace*
  • dynamic adjustment of any pixel aspect ratio
  • clever background loading / caching

During production AnimPlayer can be a replacement for expensive professional equipment such as hard disk recorders or Digi-Betacam VCRs.

Who needs AnimPlayer?

AnimPlayer is a very useful tool for people dealing with digital video or animations such as Post-Productions, Animators or SpecialFX and Animation Studios.

Does AnimPlayer integrates in a current workflow or production pipeline?

Yes. AnimPlayer smoothly integrates in any workflow or production pipeline with a rich set of command line parameters as well as text based settings- and project files.

For 3D artists full seamless integration for 3d studio Max and Maya is also provided.

Is AnimPlayer locked to any specific hardware?

No, one license can be used non-simultaneously on multiple workstations.

Do I need special hardware to run AnimPlayer?

No, AnimPlayer runs on every graphic card supporting Microsoft® DirectX® 7 or higher. We currently support Windows® XP, Windows® Vista™ and Windows 7™.

However, there can be huge differences in terms of display quality (hardware accelerated scaling) and playback speed depending on the graphics card chipset, memory bus, memory speed and driver version, parameters AnimPlayer cannot affect.

We recommend a workstation class graphic card with at least 64 MB free dedicated video memory. For smooth real-time HD playback a graphic card with PCI Express® Bus may be required.

Integrated onboard graphic cards using shared system memory like HyperMemory(AMD/ATI), TurboCache(nVIDIA) or Dynamic Video Memory Technology (DVMT - Intel) are not recommended for HD playback.

Click here to get a guide for maximum playback speed.

Are all features supported on any graphics hardware?

Yes. We try to test as many graphic configurations as possible but please understand that it is impossible to test them all. All current AMD/ATI, nVIDIA and Intel graphic cards should support all features. If there are restrictions they usually only apply to YUV 4:2:2 display mode.

Does AnimPlayer run on Windows® 7™ or Windows® Vista™?

Yes. Please download the latest version.

Does AnimPlayer run on Windows® 64 bit?

Yes. AnimPlayer does run perfectly on 64 bit Windows versions. But keep in mind that AnimPlayer is a 32 bit application and can use a maximum of  4 GigaByte of RAM per instance.

Which image formats are supported by AnimPlayer?

AnimPlayer supports a wide range of common HDR image formats with advances controls for OpenEXR and Cineon | DPX, click here for more details.

Is there a maximum image size / dimension / resolution?

AnimPlayer reads and playback images with dimensions up to 8192 x 4096 pixels*.

After startup choose: [View / Message log] get the maximum supported image size.

What is the maximum playback length of AnimPlayer?

The maximum playback length of AnimPlayer is limited only by the amount of free available system memory with a maximum total usage of 4 GigaByte (see below).

If AnimPlayer operates in YUV 4:2:2 or RGB 16 bit colorspace only 2 bytes (16 bit) are needed to store a single pixel, i.e.:

  • 5 seconds (125 frames) of PAL Video (720 x 576 pixels) requires about 100 MB of free RAM.

Is AnimPlayer able to handle more than 2 GigaByte of RAM

YES, it supports up to 4 GB of RAM on Windows 64 bit, on Windows 32 bit only 2 GB will be supported. So even you have a computer with 8 GigaByte and Windows 64-bit installed, per instance AnimPlayer can only buffer about 4 GigaByte of images in memory.

With different color spaces and the current 4GB limitation AnimPlayer can buffer about:

RGB 16 bit
YUV 4:2:2 		RGB 32 bit Image dimension
6000 3000 frames in NTSC (720 x 486 pixel)
5000 2500 frames in PAL (720 x 576 pixel)
2200 1100 frames in HD 720 (1280 x 720 pixel)
1000 500 frames in HD 1080 (1920 x 1080 pixel)
680 340 frames in 2k (2048 x 1536 pixel)

Click here for AnimPlayers exact memory usages per pixel.

Does AnimPlayer benefit from multi-processors or multi-threading ?

Yes, AnimPlayer loads images independently in a separate background thread while you can review the entire sequence. So currently you can load two images at the same time.

Calculation of lookup tables for color conversion and loading of OpenEXR files also support multi-threading. Because multi-processor systems become more and more popular, we will add more multi-threading features.

However if your disks or network are slow, multi-threading can't do magic.

What operation system do I need to run AnimPlayer?

AnimPlayer runs on nearly every version of Microsoft® Windows® which supports DirectX® 7. We currently support Windows® XP, Windows® Vista™ and Windows 7™.

What is YUV 4:2:2 colorspace?

YUV colorspace is used by a wide range of professional video equipment like Betacam SP and DigiBeta and also in nearly all digital video codecs, including JPEG, DV, DivX, MPEG 1,2,4. These codecs are used for Video-DVDs, AVI and Quicktime movies and most hard disk recorders.

  • Y is the luminance (brightness) component
  • U+V are the chrominance (color) components

4:2:2 means that the luminance channel is stored in full resolution (full width and height of the image) and the U+V components are stored in half resolution (half width but full height of the image).This is done to save resources, because the human eye is much more sensitive to luminance than to chrominance (all cats are gray in the dark).

BTW, 4:1:1 finally means that the UV components are stored in quarter resolution (half width and half height of the image).

If you want to record your final result using a hard disk recorder or digital VCR, you should use YUV 4:2:2 colorspace in playback for best simulation results.

Unfortunately we found out that some graphic cards and / or drivers don't support YUV color space very well (or at all), and playback speed can decrease on high image resolutions, TV-Field simulation or real time correction of non square pixel aspect ratios. If that happens to you, please try to switch to RGB 16 bit or RGB 32 bit colorspace for smoother playback results.

Click here on how to setup AnimPlayers display colorspace.

Click here on how to configure your computers display settings.

What is RGB 16 bit and dithering?

RGB 16 bit means that 16 bits = 2 bytes per pixel are used to display a color. Usually 24 or 32 bits = 1 byte per Red, Green and Blue channel are used to display a pixel's colors.

Because 16 bit can only display a maximum of 65536 different color shades, which sometimes results in heavy color banding, a technique called dithering is used to reduce color banding and to improve visual image quality.

AnimPlayer can use two different dithering techniques, ordered and diffusion. Ordered dithering is much faster and good for most footage but sometimes produces very light regular patterns, whereas diffusion dithering takes more processing time during image loading and adds a touch of film grain to the image. Click here for a visual dithering guide.

Usually you should not use RGB 16 bit for SD playback, but in case your graphic card or driver doesn't support YUV color space very well, RGB 16 bit runs quickly and smoothly on almost every configuration.

Answers are subject to change without notice. Errors and omissions excepted.

 

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