garageCube

A very common show scenario is for the timeline to be kept in a holding state in readiness for a cue, while other media is allowed to endlessly loop eg. Some lighting/mapping running animations while waiting for a video to start on cue. However montage tracks seem to have all media (even generative materials) with their time base locked to the timeline- when the timeline is paused the media stops moving/rendering. Other software I've used allows for individual elements in a timeline to be optionally "freerunning" while the timeline is stopped.

MadMatt pointed out that it's possible to have individual surface parameters in the timeline where a "visual" is triggered in the media bin, which freely runs outside of the timeline's timebase. But if we manually add each surface to the timeline and have keyframes to change the "visual" parameter there is no way to fade between media like a montage track would. Unless of course you have A/B surfaces etc but that's getting crazy hard to manage.

Can we please have the ability to set media as freerunning? I notice the "Timebase" parameter for surfaces which doesn't seem to do anything atm, is this maybe heading in the direction I'm talking about?
Thanks

In case anyone else has come up against this, a workaround is to use timeline player tracks, but it's a little clunky:
-In the timeline grid, create a timeline for each media changeover, with only the quads' "visual" parameter within each eg. "dunes" on quad 1 in timeline 1, "madnoise" on quad 1 in timeline 2.
-In the conductor(main timeline), add a "Timeline Player" track
-Drag each of the above timelines from the grid onto this track
-Now back in the grid, on each of these timelines you can click the cog and set them to have a transition value in order to x-fade between them, which will also work when played on the conductor.


The downsides to this are:
-The timeline player track doesn't have the same nice x-fade control on the timeline the way the montage tracks do. This means that not only is the transition invisible in the timeline, but it needs to be adjusted from the grid, potentially needing a new timeline for every different transistion duration you need in your show. I might make a feature request for this.
-The timeline player doesn't seem to offer thumbnails, presumably because it's potentially a very broad set of paramters within it. So even though it's only controlling a visual, that's not visibly demonstrated on the timeline, just your timeline names.

for free running, don't use a montage track. montage tracks have fixed timecode, which allows for instance to scrub on a generative material.

for free running, don't use a montage track. montage tracks have fixed timecode, which allows for instance to scrub on a generative material.

This is why it's a wish list item and I explained the downsides of the alternatives.