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Video
• Under Mac OS X, only the QuickTime playback engine
is available, supporting the formats AVI, MPEG, Quick-
Time and DV. If your system has a FireWire port, there is
also a FireWire option – see below.
Video quality in QuickTime
When you are using QuickTime as your video playback
engine, you can select “High Quality” from the Video win-
dow context-menu, or “Use high-quality video settings
when available” in the Device Setup dialog, Video Player
page, in the Video Properties section for QuickTime.
• When your QuickTime video was recorded with the cor-
responding quality settings, selecting the “Use high-qual-
ity video settings when available” or the “High Quality”
option will make the video display sharper and smoother.
Note that this will also lead to increased processor load.
Video playback preferences
In the Preferences (Event Display–Video page), there are
two options for video playback:
• Show Video Thumbnails.
When this is activated, thumbnail frames of the video contents are shown
in the track.
• Video Cache Size.
This determines how much memory is available for video thumbnails. If you
have long video clips and/or work with a large zoom factor (so that a lot of
frames are shown in the thumbnails), you may have to raise this value.
Playing back a video file
Video files are displayed as events/clips on the video
track, with thumbnails representing the frames in the film
(if the option Show Video Thumbnails is activated in the
Preferences, see above).
A video event on a video track
In the Track list and Inspector, you will find the following
controls for video tracks:
To view the video on the computer screen (as opposed to
on an external monitor, see below), proceed as follows:
• If you’re running Mac OS X, open the Device Setup dia-
log from the Devices menu, click “Video Player” in the list
and make sure “Onscreen Window” is selected in the
Video Output section of the dialog.
• Under Windows, either pull down the Devices menu
and select Video, or use a key command – by default [F8],
or double-click the video clip.
A video window appears. In Stop mode, this displays the video frame at
the project cursor position.
The video will be played back together with any other
events in the Project window as usual.
Playing back video without any hardware
• For the DirectShow video player, open the Device Setup
dialog from the Devices menu, click Video Player in the De-
vices list and use the buttons in the Video Properties sec-
tion to select a size or right-click in the video window to
switch to full screen. Right-click again to exit full screen.
• For the QuickTime player (Windows and Mac), you can
drag the borders, just like resizing other windows. You can
also right-click in the video window to open the Video win-
dow context menu and select one of the Size options.
There is also a Full Screen Mode available in the menu.
Right-click again or press the [Esc] key on your computer
keyboard to exit full screen mode.
Ö Playing back video on your computer screen puts a limit
on the size of the video window as well as the image quality.
!
QuickTime as a video playback engine is available
only if you have QuickTime 7.1 (or higher) installed
on your computer. If you do not have QuickTime, or if
a version lower than 7.1 is installed, this option will
not be available in Cubase AI.
Button Description
Mute Video When this is activated, video playback will be stopped,
but playback of any other events in the project will con-
tinue (to decrease the processor load). You may have to
use the Track Controls Settings dialog to make this but-
ton visible in the Track list.