The question of using high resolution video in WYSIWYG comes up often in tech support, so I thought I’d post the following information about this, in the hope that it will help you make proper decisions for working with video in your .wyg files. (Note that this information was verified and is endorsed by the video experts in our Software Development Department.) There is no good reason to use video in WYSIWYG at resolutions higher than about 720p, because the chances of it actually being displayed at that resolution within the Shaded View are small. The only exception to this would be the need to visualize the scene with the camera zoomed in on the object that’s displaying the video; however, this means not visualizing fixtures, and therefore defeats the purpose of using WYSIWYG in the first place—at least for the purpose for which the software is intended, i.e. lighting simulation. If the object displaying the video takes up only a small portion of the monitor (say a couple/few hundred pixels) the resolution of the original video must be reduced in order to “fit within its display area”… completely negating the need for a high resolution video to begin with. Please also consider the following in this context: As the resolution of the video being displayed increases (regardless of whether it is a video file, or “live” video from a capture card or a network stream) so does the processing power required to decode it, and this can result in potential performance decrease caused by the smaller amount of resources (CPU cycles) now available to WYSIWYG. Not displaying video at its native resolution requires its own processing overhead, so this may impact WYSIWYG performance as well—but certainly not as greatly as decoding it. Cheers, Dany
