RV Features

Advanced Hardware Accelerated Rendering/Compositing Engine

RV's core is an sophisticated, cross-platform, hardware accelerated compositing engine that makes optimal use of the graphics card. RV is heavily multi-threaded and it adapts to the hardware to maximize performance. RV's core can handle multiple color corrections (separate file, display and luminance LUTs), image transforms (gamma, exposure, hue, log-lin, etc.) and compositing operations (over, add, difference, tile, etc.) simultaneously in realtime.

Film Resolution, Uncompressed, High-Dynamic Range Playback

RV is fast and uses optimized rendering paths for a wide variety of image and pixel formats. RV has has no built-in resolution limits. RV's flexibility lets you adapt to different applications from inspecting 2K (or higher) floating point image sequences on the desktop to projecting HD stereoscopic dailies direct from disk in the screening room.

Stereoscopic Playback

Stereo 3D is built directly into RV. RV supports active and passive stereo including shutter glasses, anaglyph, DLP projectors, and cross-polaized HD TVs like the SpectronIQ 3-D HD TV. RV supports specialized formats like stereo QuickTime and OpenEXR 'SXR' multi-view extensions that embed multiple eyes in the same file. Because RV always conforms input media, stereo playback naturally works with mixed formats and resolutions (e.g.a 2K Exr sequence for the left eye and a 1K QuickTime movie for the right eye).

High Dynamic Range Pixel Management

RV gives you direct control over how your image data is handled. RV supports integer images (8 and 16 bits per channel) and floating-point images (16 and 32 bits per channel) and it lets you decide how images are cached. For example, for review of film resolution sequences you can cache images into an 8 bit integer format to fit more frames into memory. For inspecting high dynamic range material such as film scans you can cache the original image data and then adjust the exposure in real-time.

Real-Time Color Correction

RV applies color corrections in real-time using your graphics card.  RV gives you fine grained control over the color correction pipeline, including the use of 3D LUTs, luminance LUTs, and channel LUTs as well as two gamma corrections (one to linearize input and another to match your display device). RV will also use the graphics card to precisely compute many useful color transforms, such as Log->sRGB, Log->Gamma2.2, sRGB->Linear, etc.  Color parameters  such as gamma, hue and exposure can all be adjusted interactively real-time. And because RV can cache high dynamic range data, real-time adjustments operate on the full range of your input images.

Sequences, EDLs and Frame Marking

RV makes it easy to work with multiple image sequences, movies and still frames. You can load multiple clips from the command line, with drag-and-drop, or by reading a text based EDL. RV lets you mark the timeline so you can quickly navigate using hot keys. For example, a movie of a sequence can be marked at the shot boundaries so that you can skip from shot to shot or loop over each shot.

OpenEXR Multi-Layer and Multi-View Support

RV is the first playback system to take full advantage of OpenExr's latest features including 'SXR' stereo multi-view files. RV automatically interprets 'SXR' files as stereo views. RV also lets you work with multi-layer Exrs, by choosing which layers to display.

Compare, Tile, Sequence, Composite any Number of Sources

RV lets you view all of your source material as a sequence or a stack. In RV it easy to compare takes, composite elements, and tile images or movies. RV also makes  it easy to create reference takes (say a four-up view of related sequences rendered out in a single QuickTime movie, or an animation take with reference video as a picture-in-picture). All of these operations are also fully supported with stereo sources.

Color Management and UI Customization Per Source

RV provides a customizable source setup function (written in RV's extension language). Source setup is called for each source load and provides full control over how RV is configured.

This permits extremely fine-grained control. Users can devise arbitrary rules based on image attributes, environment variables, etc. These rules can make full use of RV's extension language and can apply luts, turn on or off RV's built in shaders, and set image aspect ratios, mattes, or any other RV feature. For example, Exr's for compositors working on one sequence could be handled differently than Exr's for TD's working on a different sequence. Or Quicktime movies with baked in gamma, could be linearized to match Exr sequences - so that a common display lut & gamma can be applied.

Workflow and Configurability

RV was created in a production environment. It has a minimal, unobtrusive interface and can be easily customized to fit into different ways of working and different pipelines. RV can be launched with a rich set of command-line instructions or can be used with drag-and-drop interactivity. It has a complete set of hot keys and key chords that let you quickly navigate through sequences, adjust display attributes, inspect pixels, and display image information.

RV is highly configurable. It is built on a unique architecture that was designed from the ground up to allow for customization. You can use RV’s powerful extension language to modify the interface, change key bindings and make your own menus and commands. For example, one facility uses RV’s extension language to add menu items to RV that load the latest sequence EDLs from a central location. This allows artists to review a current shot in context of surrounding shots

Shadow Maps, Height Maps and Custom Images

RV also makes it easy to work with custom or non-standard images. For example, floating-point images with RGBA and Z channels can be viewed in RV with the Z-data mapped into one of the display channels. 32 bit floating-point height maps or shadow maps can also be loaded into RV and then inspected with various techniques. For example, the data can be normalized, mapped by hue or run through a contour LUT. RV's contour LUTs are generated procedurally with RV's extension language and can be modified by the user--they are a good example of the power and flexibility of RV's architecture. RV also comes with a plugin SDK so you can use your own image and movie formats.