Rv and Screening Room Cut Length/Full Length settings

Hi

We are loving RV Screening Room and at the moment I am going through getting it setup to be used for all internal team reviews on edit context.

I am hoping we are just missing the hidden tricks, so i thought I’d ask… :slight_smile:):

There are just a few things which in my opinion make it a little confusing to artists, and one of them is how to interact with the “Cut length” option (quite important when playing a timeline):

  • The default when using the “Cut View” should probably be cut length?
    We think that’s the most likely event when playing a timeline.

  • We tried setting the “Cut Length” option by default on start (using the RV forced preferences), but the problem is that this option applies to any media loaded into RV from SG (“Play in RV”).
    So having that default preference isn’t a good solution at all, since its’ not linked to “Cut View” in RV Screening Room but to RV in General.

  • Also, it’s not obvious if currently being playing “Full length” or “Cut length”
    Maybe a visual cue (acting as a toggle or option icon) close the “Cut View option”?

In general, I am trying to reduce to minimum the “different options and toggles” artists need to go through when launching RV Screening Room to review work on Edit context.
Also do that without affecting the interaction users will have when using RV to load media published to SG.

Great tool! I am hoping to get it going at our studio since it will be a massive gain!

Many Thanks

Jacob

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Hey Jacob!

Thank you for posting in the community.

I thought I’d go over the default behavior and then we can over your specific case.

Here are the different options inside of Screening Room:

  • Full Length - plays all the frames in the Version. Numbers the first frame based on the value of the “First Frame” field on the Version and counts up from there.
  • Full without slate - cuts off the first frame, plays all the rest
  • Cut length - this reads the “Cut In” and “Cut Out” fields from the Shot a Version is linked to (assuming it is linked to a Shot) and trims the playback to those start and end frames.

Now for your specific points:

The default when using the “Cut View” should probably be cut length?
We think that’s the most likely event when playing a timeline.

Screening Room should remember you last preference, so you can set your session to always play in Cut Length. You can set it either per-session or per-source. Or do you mean that whenever you enable “Cut View” in Screening Room, you want “Cut Length” option to be enabled by default, without having to enable it yourself?

We tried setting the “Cut Length” option by default on start (using the RV forced preferences), but the problem is that this option applies to any media loaded into RV from SG (“Play in RV”).
So having that default preference isn’t a good solution at all, since its’ not linked to “Cut View” in RV Screening Room but to RV in General.

I’m not sure I understand this use case scenario. Could you please elaborate? Are you setting preferences in RV but you have other projects that don’t need to play in a cut view? Did you set preferences by going to RV -> Shotgun -> Session Prefs -> Frame Range -> Cut Length?

Also, it’s not obvious if currently being playing “Full length” or “Cut length”
Maybe a visual cue (acting as a toggle or option icon) close the “Cut View option”?

Yup, agreed, this would be nice. I’ll put in a feature request for this point. For future feature requests, you can submit them directly into the public roadmap where your request goes directly to our product team, who will review your request and determine the next steps.

Hope this helps!

– Alexa

4 Likes

Hi Alexa

Thanks a lot for your reply and for adding the feature request.

In a nutshell what I guess I would love to do is to default Cut Length only when using the “Cut View”, but not for other types of media Review in RV (and specially not when using RV to review SG versions without using RV Screening Room).
For us it would make more sense if the Cut Length option gets enabled when you enter the “Cut View” (default or via a preference).

The use case is that throughout the day artists are using RV Screening and also simply RV (from Shotgun “Play in RV”).

Because the " Frame Range" option is not exclusive to Screening Room (or Cut View), artists constantly need to be changing between Cut Length or Full Length depending of how they are using RV.

In our case, we can’t think of cases where we’d like Cut Length when reviewing isolated versions using the “Play In RV” option from the SG Media page (great for loading exr sequences/movies from disk for best resolution, OCIO support, AOV’s in the case of CG Renders…).

So If I was to default the Cut Length option (by deployed default preferences as I first thought of doing), when users load media in RV using “Play in RV” it will then play it without handles, which is not desired.
Although RV remembers the user’s last preference, it becomes a constant change of a “little hidden” option when using RV for different purposes throughout your day (plus it leads to confusion as to what you are watching since there is no visual cue of which option is actually checked).

Thanks

Jacob

3 Likes

Thank you for that detailed feedback! Unfortunately that’s not possible at the moment and would require a feature request as well. :frowning:

I’ve put in a feature request for you, please keep an eye on the roadmap.

Thanks,
Alexa

2 Likes

Thanks Alexa

2 Likes