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Using the Visual Player Utility

Use this utility to play to the screen any animations that you have generated using Renderize Live and saved into one of the following formats: FLC, TGA, BMP, TIF, GIF, RAW, RAS and RGB.

Animations are displayed on screen at the resolution at which they are rendered.  The animation viewport cannot be resized.

There are three steps involved in playing an animation using this utility:

1.	Open the animation.

2.	Load the animation into memory.

3.	Play the animation.


Open the Animation

Open an animation by selecting it from file.  Select File, Open from the Menu Bar, then choose the desired file type and select the desired animation from the File Browser.  If you are loading an animation that was saved to one of the bitmap file formats (TGA, BMP, TIF, GIF, RAW, RAW or RGB) remember that each frame in the animation is stored into a separate file: to load this kind of an animation select on the filename that contains the first frame in the animation sequence.  This filename will contain the designation "0001" as the last 4 characters of the 8-character DOS filename.


Load the Animation into Memory

After you open an animation, press the Load button to load that animation into memory.  When you select this button, a viewport appears.  As each frame is loaded into memory, it is displayed in this viewport.

The Frames type-ins beside the Load button are used to specify how much of the animation sequence to load into memory.  The default setting is such that all of the frames in the animation will be loaded.  If you only wish to load and play a portion of the animation sequence, use these type-ins to specify which frames should be loaded into memory.  The By type-in allows you to skip frames. For example, if you set by to 2, every other frame will be loaded.


Play the Animation

Press the Play button to play an animation that has been loaded into memory.  As soon as you press this button, the entire animation in memory is played from beginning to end.

The speed at which the animation is played depends on the resolution of the animation and the configuration and performance characteristics of your display card and CPU.  In addition, you can enter a value in the Frames Per Sec type-in to regulate the speed at which the animation is played.  The default value of 0 instructs the software to play the animation as fast as your system will allow.  A message to the right of this type-in tells you the actual speed at which an animation is being played.

The Frames type-ins beside the Play button are used to specify how much of the animation sequence to play.  The default setting is such that all of the frames in the animation will be loaded.  If you only wish to play a portion of the animation sequence, use these type-ins to specify which frames should be played.  The By type-in allows you to skip frames. For example, if you set by to 2, every other frame will be displayed.

The Step and Back buttons allow you to step one frame at a time forward and backward through the animation sequence.  The Current Frame type-in allows you to go directly to specific frame in the animation sequence.