Previewing
The Play button in the Navigation Panel serves two purposes: for playback of your entire project or a selected clip. To play back, click Project or Clip, then click Play.
While working on your project, you will want to preview your work frequently to see how your project is progressing. VideoStudio offers you two preview options: Instant Playback and High Quality Playback. Select File: Preferences – General, then choose the preview method that you prefer in Playback method.
· Instant Playback allows you to quickly preview changes in your project without the need to create a temporary preview file, however, playback may be jerky depending on your computer resources.
· High Quality Playback renders your project as a temporary preview file then plays this preview file. Playback is smoother in High Quality Playback mode, but rendering your project for the first time in this mode may take a long time to complete depending on the size of your project and computer resources.
Note: When Perform non-square pixel rendering is selected in the Project Options dialog box (opened from Project Properties dialog box), Instant Playback performance may be affected if computer resources are insufficient.
In High Quality Playback mode, VideoStudio uses SmartRender technology which renders only the changes you made such as transitions, titles and effects, and eliminates re-rendering the entire project. SmartRender saves time when generating previews.
Setting a preview range
For faster previews, you may choose to play only a part of your project. The selected range of frames to preview is referred to as the preview range, and it is marked as a red bar in the Ruler Panel.
To play the preview area only:
1 Use the Trim Handles or the Mark-in/out buttons to select the preview range.
The Preview range mark-in and Preview range mark-out timecodes will then be displayed in the Options Panel.
2 To preview the selected range, select what you want to preview (Project or Clip), then click Play. To preview the entire clip, hold [Shift], then click Play.