polac wrote:Ok, I installed the Studio One 2 Demo here now, the mediavst.dll seems to work just fine here. You also don't have to place a note to a track to make it run in Studio One. If you jump to a new song position the video position is also updated correctly here. To make it clear, the video always syncs to song position, you cannot make the video begin playing at a certain song position xy for example(time offset).
Now here's a strange thing: I could
swear that during a test a did a while ago, I got videos playing from the point where I inserted a MIDI note, following the instruction I mentioned. And now you mention that it isn't even supposed to work that way! Duh...
It looks like I might have been led to mistakenly believe I got videos to start from the MIDI note, due to not knowing the video(s) well I tested...
or maybe it was just voodoo, who knows...
If your video-VST is supposed to work
only so that it plays videos from the very start of a song, with no offset possible, then well... everything works fine here too.
On the other hand, being able to set an offset for a video is absolutely CRUCIAL for most music to video work. Not being able to set an offset seriously reduces the usefulness of this video-VST.
It almost never happens that you'd have a video where the music starts at exactly the first frame, or where you'd want the first beat of a timeline to correspond to the first frame of a video. Also think about footage that is preceded by a count-down (with number pictures).
If music starts after the first frame, to get music synchronized precisely to certain points of the video a workaround could be to mess around with tempos and such, to get the first beat of the actual music where you want it. But this is hopelessly cumbersome and a waste of precious time that should go into working the music...
You might like to take a look at how the video player of Studio One (Professional) works. Notice the small clock symbol sitting in the lower margin of the video player's window. When you click on it, you can set an offset for the video, so that its starting time can be adapted to the track you're working on. Notice that you can set a positive as well as a negative offset (so that the video starts "before" the song's starting point).
If you could add this feature to your video VST, it would instantly be PERFECT for music to video work! It doesn't look like such a very difficult thing to add, but then, I'm not a programmer
It would make all the difference.
The reason why I'm very much interested to use your video-VST with the added option of an offset, even though I have Studio One's video player available and even though there are a few other DAWs that have a video player available that work to varying degrees, is that your's simply works so well (aside from the missing functionality), and it presently has the potential to be the best video solution for working with Studio One (which is presently the DAW that I prefer to use).
Even though your video player can only read a limited number of video formats, once it loads, the video plays nicely, fluently, and its audio is neatly routed to a track bus. It all works!!
Major advantages of your video-VST are that starting the video is (pretty much) instant, scrolling and starting to a different point is instant and fluent, scrolling through video frames is just as easy and FLUENT, and instant.
In contrast, Studio One's video player is simply awful to use in its present state, and pretty much unusable as far as I'm concerned, at least for creating music synced to video. I'm referring to SO for Windows here. Maybe the Mac version works better...
Even though the player should accept most/many video formats/codecs, I still haven't found which format works best for it. I only got it to work fairly well with Quicktime format (MOV), but haven't managed to get any audio with that
Other formats generally end up crashing my PC (and I have a very reasonably powerful PC, so
that should not be the issue). Using QT format, when starting the video (i.e. song) some time elapses before it rolls, and scrolling through frames is a pain in the ass (pretty much unworkable).
So Polac, I have great hopes for being able to use your video-VST, one day. I'm actually quite certain you have the ability to add the extra functionality of being able to set an offset, seeing how well things work in the present state!
And even though you've made this a free VST (together with all the other plug-ins), who knows you could sell your video-VST to Presonus (in some way or form)?
Trust me, they could use it seeing how things are in the present version!
Take care