Using Contact Sheet: Playback

Once you have populated the Contact Sheet Viewer with some clips, there are several things to note in regard to playback, navigation and quality in the Contact Sheet Viewer.

Time

Looking at the timebar under the Contact Sheet Viewer, you’ll notice that the clips in the Contact Sheet do not have a temporal relationship to the where they exist in the sequence. In fact the Contact Sheet and Timeline viewers act independently of each other when it comes to playback. Playing, scrubbing and stepping through frames in the sequence or timeline viewer does not affect the Contact Sheet Viewer and vice versa.

Cache

The playback cache is automatically split in half when a Contact Sheet Viewer is opened. For example, if you have assigned 20GB of RAM in your playback cache preferences 10GB will be allocated to the Contact Sheet Viewer and 10GB to the Timeline Viewer when using Contact Sheet.

On closing a Contact Sheet Viewer, this RAW allocation will be returned to the active Viewer.

Playback range

If you look at the duration of the Timeline Viewer showing the sequence and the Contact Sheet Viewer duration you’ll notice that they are considerably different.

This is because clips displayed in the Contact Sheet Viewer are all synced to frame 1 and the Contact Sheet Viewer playback range is dynamically determined by the the longest clip in the current selection. This also means that you will see shorter clips freeze on the last frame when you playback or scrub, and held to the duration of the longest clip.

As mentioned above, this means that the Contact Sheet playback range will constantly change according to the clips loaded.

Navigation around the Contact Sheet Viewer is exactly the same as the standard Viewer so you can use the normal zooming and panning gestures and home and fit hotkeys. You will also have a lot of the same Viewer controls as in the standard Viewer but with some exceptions.

Quality

Most notably is the lack of a proxy or quality setting drop down. To enhance performance, the Contact Sheet will automatically set this for you.

By default the initial Contact Sheet Viewer resolution is set to HD 1920x1080 regardless of the sequence resolution. Depending on your display device this may be perfectly fine for general viewing and comparison tasks. But if you are using the Contact Sheet Viewer for more critical decisions then you will most likely require a higher fidelity.

Take the example here where we have loaded four clips into the Contact Sheet Viewer and zoomed into a similar area in both the timeline viewer on the left and the same clip in the Contact Sheet Viewer on the right. You can clearly see some pixelation happening in the Contact Sheet Viewer.

Improving quality

You can improve the quality of the Contact Sheet image by increasing the resolution of the Contact Sheet Viewer.

To do this, access the Output Resolution option found in the Contact Sheet Settings cog. This provides a familiar interface similar to the Sequence Output resolution setting, but again like the Viewer player timebar, this setting is particular to just the Contact Sheet Viewer.

If we change the Contact Sheet output resolution to UHD 3140x2160 4K we can now see a huge improvement of the zoomed in area compared to the Timeline Viewer.

Note: Like the Viewer’s playback behavior, the sequence resolution and the Contact Sheet’s resolution are not directly linked which allows you a lot of flexibility.