Playback

Pro

Playback is an Orbit Pro feature.

New in 1.6.0 (beta)

Video playback and scrubbing were rebuilt across the 1.6.0 betas (b3 and b4). Everything on this page describes the 1.6.0 beta.

Orbit plays video in sync with your ADM or IAMF audio — the transport drives the picture, so what you see is always the frame that belongs to what you hear.

Frame-accurate playback

Video plays at the file's own frame rate. Each frame is handed to the screen stamped with the exact instant it belongs to, on a clock slaved to Orbit's transport, and macOS chooses when each one appears — the way QuickTime and Final Cut present video.

This matters most at 50 and 60 fps. Earlier versions composited on one clock and displayed on another, and at high frame rates the two could beat against each other, so a frame would land a fraction of a second early or late often enough to read as stutter. That was a frame-rate problem, not a resolution one — a 1080p60 clip was affected just as much as 4K. Playback is now steady and on time for the whole timeline.

Colour

Frames carry the colour tags of the file they came from — BT.709 for BT.709 footage, HDR tags for HDR footage — and the display treats them accordingly, so the picture is the file's own colour.

The colour space Orbit composites in is shown in Preferences → Video → Colour → Working Space (Standard (Rec. 709)): every clip is converted into this space before compositing, so fades, opacity and mixed-camera timelines blend in linear light, and a Rec. 2020 clip lands correctly beside a Rec. 709 one. The display transform converts out of it once, at the end.

Scrubbing

Paused seeks — dragging the playhead, clicking in the timeline — go through a dedicated scrub decoder, built the way QuickTime scrubs:

• One decoder per clip, kept open and pointed straight at the frame you want, instead of being torn down and rebuilt on every backward or far seek.
• Latest target wins, so a fast drag never queues up a backlog of frames.
• On long-GOP footage (typical H.264 / HEVC camera files), Orbit shows the nearest keyframe while you drag and lands the exact frame when you stop.
• ProRes needs no keyframe at all, so every frame is instant.

Landing an exact frame deep inside a long GOP still means decoding every frame before it — a third of a second to a second and a half on any player. That's why Orbit's ProRes optimised media is the answer for long-GOP camera files: it scrubs any 4K frame in a few milliseconds.

In numbers

Measured on a test Mac, time from seek to picture: a 4K50 ProRes proxy went from 219 ms (worst case) in b3 to 2.8 ms typical / 13.8 ms worst in b4; a 4K50 H.264 camera clip with a 250-frame GOP, unoptimised, reaches its keyframe in 16 ms typical / 45 ms worst.

Filmstrip thumbnails

Opening a long clip fills its filmstrip almost all at once: Orbit asks for the whole visible strip in one request, starting from wherever you're looking and working outward, so a 4K clip's thumbnails land in well under a second.

Background work yields to playback

Thumbnail generation and optimising media step out of the way while the transport is playing and resume the moment you stop, so neither competes with the picture on screen for decode bandwidth.

Viewer quality

Preferences → Video → Viewer Quality sets how sharply the viewer draws:

• Better Quality — the viewer renders at its own size on screen, up to the project's full resolution, for the sharpest preview.
• Better Performance — the viewer renders at half its size on screen, for the smoothest playback on large footage. Recommended.

If playback can't keep up, the viewer steps its resolution down on its own and back up at the next pause. This only changes what the viewer draws — it doesn't affect your optimised media, and it never affects an export.

See also

• Video Optimisation — ProRes optimised media for instant scrubbing.
• Supported Formats — which files Orbit can play.