MPlay's User Interface

MPlay's main user interface is arranged in collapsable bars around the outside of the image. Each bar can be collapsed, shown or hidden, depending on the profile layout (see Profile Manager for details on profiles). A bar may be collapsed by clicking the small bevelled rectangle at the left or top of the bar. If a bar is already collapsed, it will appear as a thin horizontal or vertical bar. Clicking the bar will show it. If a bar is hidden, it will not appear on the UI at all - you will need to use the Ctrl+RMB menu (over the viewport) and toggle on the bar (you can do this with collapsed or exposed bars, as well).

Menu Bar
Main Bar
Diff Bar

   View Bar     Mplay User Interface Layout    Display Bar

Inspect Bar
Control Bar
Playbar

Each bar generally contains similar types of controls.
Each bar's components are explored in detail below, from left to right for horizontal bars, and top to bottom for veritcal bars.

Menu Bar

Menu Bar

File Menu Options Menu Images Menu
This menu lists all the image sequences currently loaded into mplay. The sequence in the current viewport is highlighted. Selecting another image sequence will change the sequence displayed by the current viewport.

Half Window Size (icon button)
 Halves the MPlay window size (if possible).

Double Window Size (icon button)
Doubles the MPlay window size, up to the screen resolution.

(the following buttons only appear if mplay is listening for renders or flipbooks)

Start New Sequence (icon button)
The next image received will go into a new sequence. All subsequent images will be appended to that sequence.

Kill Renders (icon button)
Stops all active renders and terminates the render process(es).

Disconnect (icon button)
Stops listening to renders. The next image rendered to 'ip' will start a new MPlay process.

Main Bar

Main Bar

Viewer Mode Selection  (icon menu)
Selects the main viewing mode of this MPlay window.
Display Plane Menu  (menu)
Selects the current plane to display. The planes listed are a union of all planes in all sequences. Not all sequences may have the plane selected.

Image Proxy Level (menu)
Selects the proxy level of the image.  This changes the image resolution, not the zoom (viewing) level.

Viewport Layout (menu)
Sets the viewport layout, which is useful for viewing more than one sequence simultaneously.

Frame Back (icon button)
Moves the playbar 1 frame back.

Frame Forward (icon button)
Moves the playbar 1 frame forward.

Adapt Frame Range (icon button)
Sets the playbar's frame range to the frame range of the sequence in the current viewport.

Zoom Current Viewport (icon button)
If more than one viewport is displayed, this maximizes the current viewport to fill the viewport area. Toggling this button off will restore the split viewport view.

Apply Changes to All Viewports (icon button)
If on, changes to display options, color controls, display plane selection and homing will affect all viewports. If off, only the current viewport will be affected by these changes.

Link Scolling to All Viewports (icon button)
 If on, scrolling or zooming in one viewport will scroll or zoom to the same location in all other viewports.

Diff Bar

Diff Bar

Diff Sequence Menu (icon menu)
Selects the sequence to diff the current sequence against. The diff sequence can also be selected in the Sequence Manager.

Diff Mode (icon menu)
Selects the image comparison method (C is the current sequence, D is the diff sequence):

Diff Amount / Highlight Threshold (float field and slider)
For horizontal wipe, vertical wipe and blend, this represents the amount to blend C with D. For highlight differences, this is the threshold value.

Frame Selection (icon menu)
Images can also be compared against images at other frames. This is especially useful when you compare a sequence against itself, but want to see the difference between frames.

Frame Number / Offset (integer field)
For a frame selection of "Frame Offset" or "Specific Frame", this specifies the frame offset or the specific frame number.

View Bar

View Bar
Zoom In
Zooms the view by 200% (focusing in on the image)
Zoom Out
Expands the view by 200% (showing more of the image)
Home
Adapts the image to its home location. The image size and location depends on the following two toggles.

Size Adapt
If on, and Exact Pixel Size is off, this will fit the image to the viewport. If Exact Pixel Size is on, it will attempt to center the image in the viewport. This will be automatically switched off when you pan or zoom a viewport.
Exact Pixel Size
If on, the image will appear at 100% zoom level, so that 1 pixel in the image corresponds to 1 screen pixel. If off, the zoom size can be any zoom level. This will be automatically switched off when you zoom a viewport.

Clear Selection
If you have selected a sub-region of the image by Shift+LMB dragging, this will clear the selection and display the entire image.
Save Image
Saves the current frame of the current viewport's sequence, similar to File->Save Current Frame.
Size Window To Image
 Fits the MPlay window around the image at 100% zoom. The MPlay window will not resize to larger than the screen resolution, nor will it size to smaller than its minimum size.

Display Bar

Display Bar
Open/Close Display Options
Pops up the Display Options dialog (or closes it if it is already opened).

Enable Viewport
Turns on the current viewport. If on, the viewport will not display anything except black.
Show Labels
Toggles the Information text at the top of each viewport.
Show Guides
Toggles the Image frame, TimeLine guides or graph guides.
Show Preview
Toggles the image preview. In Image and Graph views, this is a small overview of the image in the lower right corner of the viewport. In the TimeLine, this shows the image sequence progression on the bars at frame intervals.
Toggle Rulers
Toggles the rulers, which show X/Y pixel information.
Toggle Transparency
Toggles image transparency. This will only do anything if the image has an alpha plane.
Toggle Background Image
Toggles the background image. If transparency is on, or a sub-portion of the image is selected, you will see the background image behind the main sequences' images.

Open Magnify Window
Opens the Magnify window, which shows inspection information, plus a highly zoomed area of the image, based on the mouse location over the image in the viewport.

Inspect Bar

The exact information show in the inspect bar depends on the viewer. However, regardless of viewer, the values displayed are always linked to the mouse pointer, and will always retrieve the information from under the pointer (if any exists).

2D Image Viewer

Inspect Bar

The inspect bar shows the pixel value of the pixel under the mouse. The information shown is:

             Values      Raw Values
        Hue/Sat/Lum     Inspect LUT values
X,Y pixel location     U,V pixel location

Values shows the 0-1 value of the color, per component. (0=black, 1=white). Values may be less than zero or greater than one.

The Raw values show the actual values stored in the format (for 8 bit, this would be values between 0 and 255). This will not appear if the format is floating point (since it's the same as Values in that case).

The Inspect LUT values only appear if an Inspect LUT was specified in the command line or the Display Options "Correction" page. This shows you the raw values run backwards through the LUT. This is useful for a format like Cineon, where you may want to see the Cineon numbers in addition to the raw linear values.

The location of the pixel is shown in X,Y values (0 - xres-1, 0 - yres-1) and U, V values (0-1).

Timeline Viewer

Timeline Inspect Bar

The inspect bar shows you what frame you are over, and its name (in case many unrelated files are loaded into 1 sequence).  It also displays the frame range and frame rate of the current sequence,  and the resolution of the current image.

Graph Viewer

Graph Inspect Bar

The information shown depends on the graph mode being used. For histograms, it displays the current value and that values frequency in the image. For other graphs, it shows the X axis and Y axis values, plus the number of times that X,Y pair has occurred. For example, in a Hue vs. Saturation plot, it would show you the current Hue value, the current Saturation value, and the number of times that Hue/Saturation pair occurred.

Control Bar

Control Bar

The control bar for the 2D Image viewer consists mostly of color correction controls, so that you can more closely examine areas of color. The timeline and graph viewers have different control bars, explained below.

2D Image Viewer


RGBA Component View
The component strip allows you to view an image's individual components (R,G,B or A). The far left button returns to normal viewing mode (RGB).  The default hotkeys for this strip are:

Show All Components ~
Show Red 1
Show Green 2
Show Blue 3
Show Alpha / Fourth 4
Color Controls
The image's colors can be manipulated in two ways. The first is by modifying the images brightness, contrast and bright shift. The second (accessed by clicking the circular arrow button) allows you to specify the lower (black) and upper (white) range of the displayed image. For example, setting the black point to 0.4 and the white point to 0.6 would show 0.4 and below as black, 0.6 and above as white, and values in between the two in much higher contrast than normal.

When a color correction value is set to something other than its default, its icon will turn red to warn you that the image displayed is modified from its original color. You can reset all the color correction values to their defaults by pressing Shift+R (default hotkey).

Both color modes are a different way of setting the same color values, so they are tied together. When you toggle to the other method, it will already be setup with the equivalent values to the previous method.
Gamma Control (icon button & float field)
Changes the gamma of the displayed image. Clicking the icon resets the gamma to the default gamma setting (defined in the Display Options, Correction page) which is normally 1.

Adapt to Full Pixel Range (icon button)
When pressed, this sets the color correction controls so that the entire pixel range of the image is displayed. So, if the image had a minimum value of 0.1, and a maximum value of 0.95, it would set the black and white points to 0.1, 0.95. This is most useful for high dynamic range images and depth maps. For depth maps, the farthest Z depth value and the closest Z depth value are ignored (to exclude the cases of a background plate, and 'zero' depth). The default hotkey for this action is r.

TimeLine Viewer Control Bar

For the timeline viewer, the control bar is quite different. There are no color correction controls available in this viewer.

Graph Display Options - Pops up a menu with 2 options: display time as frames or seconds, and the guide density (none to high).
Preview Frames - When previews are on (Ctrl+P), this specifies how often to display the next preview on the graph bars, in frames.

Graph Viewer Control Bar

The graph viewer has a RGBA component view control like the 2D viewer. This controls which components are graphed. This is not supported for all graph types (Hue, Sat and Value graphs require full RGB).

The other control available is the graph type. The graphs available are:


Playbar

Playbar

Play controls
The icon buttons are the basic play commands. From left to right, these are (with their default hotkey):
Frame Field
Displays the current frame. Left click to edit, Middle click to use the popup slider to modify, and Right click to set the frame to its previous value.

Play slider
Left click to set the new value, left drag the bar to scub. Middle click uses the popup slider to modify the frame value, and Right click sets the frame to its previous value.

Frame Range Controls
The frame range is normally hidden. Press the small '<' button to expand the 2 frame range fields. The first field contains the start frame, and the second contains the end frame. The frame bar will play frames between these 2 values.

Frame Rate Field
The current global FPS. This has no effect unless realtime is on (next button).

Realtime Mode Toggle
Toggles realtime playback. If off, frames play sequentially as fast as mplay can play them. If on, frames play back at the rate specified in the Frame Rate field.

Playback Mode Menu
Playback has three different modes: