Pause single Layer

[TimProjection]

Hi guys,

I'd be so grateful if someone could help me!

I'm in early planning stages for doing the visual backgrounds for a show. We have a few scenes that I'm not sure how to tackle.

Basically we have a full sized car which is a set piece and projected behind it is a country-side setting.

We are going to have the country-side moving left to right to give the illusion that the car is moving. However, the car needs to stop for period of time, before they get in and continue driving. Sounds simple enough, but I can't just project the background and pause it because the background motion because the country side needs to stop moving but the clouds must continue to move.

Is there a software that allows you to pause 1 layer of video while allowing another to continue playing? and then resume the paused layer?

Thanks for your help! I'm pretty stumped

 

[TheaterEd]

You could try having your clouds on a gobo loop and just project from a s4 over your projection. This way the sky in your projection is just blue and the clouds come from a separate source.

More info Here

 

[ruinexplorer]

Completely possible depending on what you are using for playback. The simplest is to do as TheaterEd suggests. What is your proposed set-up?

 

[ThomasL]

"Is there a software that allows you to pause 1 layer of video while allowing another to continue playing? and then resume the paused layer?"

I know of 2 software that can do this: Dataton Watchout and AvStumpfl Wings Platinum. There may be others.

Essentially, the media's Properties that you want to continue playing is set to "free running" (Watchout) or "Loop & Asynchronous" (Wings Platinum 4 Pro version and higher) such that when you pause the timeline, they will continue to play.

 

[Drew Schmidt]

If you want to use projections to do this, most software solutions should be able to handle this. The exact method is the question.

I've done this same idea plenty of times in Qlab. You'll need a video license to do this, so can't just use the free version. But the video license is much cheaper than many other software solutions, plus you could opt to simply rent the license for the duration of your tech / run ($5 / day). And don't forget about educational discounts with most software.

The main idea, no matter what software you use, is that sky and the country-side are on different layers, sky being behind the country-side.
The actual sky above the ground / horizon in the country-side layer then needs to be transparent, making it so that you can see the sky layer beneath.

From here, the actual method of the movement really depends on if you're using still images or videos.
This will also determine what kind of file you need as your country-side layer needs to have transparency in it (i.e. PNG for still images, ProRes 4444 for video)