R5.15 Release

We are proud to announce that Ventuz R5.15 is available for download from now on.

R5.15 is a milestone in VENTUZ development, due to the following Highlights:

SlimDX

In order to keep pace with the latest technology available, it was necessary to replace all of Microsoft’s Managed DirectX (MDX) by SlimDX, an open source library which allows .NET 2.0+ applications to use Microsoft's DirectX APIs, as well as several related Microsoft multimedia APIs. MDX had become a bottleneck in several areas of VENTUZ development, since Microsoft stopped MDX development. The latest MDX available is based on .NET 1.1 and was preventing Ventuz Technology from developing a 64bit version of VENTUZ. SlimDX enables Ventuz Technology Group to implement new Microsoft API’s like Xaudio2, RawInput, X3Daudio or Xinput in future releases.
Furthermore, SlimDX is supporting Direct3D 10 and other state-of-the-art technologies, which makes it the perfect choice for VENTUZ!  http://slimdx.org/

Based on Microsoft .NET 3.5 SP1

The VENTUZ core has been updated and is now completely based on .NET 3.5 SP1.

Quicktime

VENTUZ now supports Quicktime Video! VENTUZ R5.15 contains two new nodes – the Quicktime Movie node and the Quicktime Animation node.
The Quicktime Movie node provides frame-accurate playback of Quicktime movies as well as other MPEG4 und H.264 encoded clips. If Audio-Scrub mode is activated, the VENTUZ Animation Editor offers „video-scrubbing“ inside Quicktime videos.
The Quicktime Animation node is designed to playback image-sequences - frame accurately, forward and backward including Alpha. Quicktime Animations are not loaded into RAM and therefore perfect for large pre-rendered graphics sequences. Please make sure to use Animation Codec in order to achieve proper results!
The Cluster-Mode inside the VENTUZ 2008 Professional Edition provides synchronous playback of Quicktime Movies on any size of cluster of machines, offering „unlimited“ video-playback-resolutions.

Revision of all Broadcast implementations. Decklink is back!

All Broadcast video-board implementations have been revised:
VENTUZ now supports: Deltacast-sdi und Deltacast-hd, DVS Centaurus II and LT, Blackmagic Decklink series, Matrox XMIO

- simplified and uniformed configuration
- improved performance
- uniformed Colorspace Conversion for video input and output via GPU
- updated Blackmagic implementation in order to support latest generation video-boards (Decklink Extreme2)
- support for multiple Deltacast boards in a single machine in order to have additional video inputs (Broadcast and Professional)

Selection Bookmarks

The Hierarchy-Editor now offers the functionality to bookmark the by then current selection. These bookmarks will be saved globally within the scene, therefore scene navigation becomes quicker and easier.

General Improvements, Changes and Bug-Fixes

FEATURE	F288	The Hierarchy editor can save "Selection Bookmarks" with the scene for easy relocating the items you're currently working on.
FEATURE	F447	The native Datapath DVI capture card implementation can now be configured to transfer only 16bit per pixel. This gives you lower color quality, but higher performance. See Hardware Profile, Local Video input Hardware. Professional Edition only
FEATURE	F448	The Find/Replace function of the Designer can now find and replace ordinary property values
FEATURE	F449	Improved scene closing speed.
FEATURE	F450	Significantly improved bounding box validation speed in Designer mode.
FEATURE	F451	The Counter node was enhanced to switch between frame-based (default) and time-based progress mode.
FEATURE	F452	The Animation Editor in Diagram mode was extended by a Reset Spline Handles functionality.
FEATURE	F453	Added possibility to revert changes of numeric properties in the Property Editor. If you change property values by dragging a field with LMB just press ESC or RMB and the property value is reset to the start value.
FEATURE	F454	The size of a Rectangle geometry can now be "normalized". This allows an easy assignment of the texture dimensions (image/clip) to the size of the rectangle. The rectangle won't never exceed 1.0 in width or height by keeping the aspect.
FEATURE	F455	Support for Quicktime Movies and Animations with network synchronized frame playback and scrubbing in the animation editor. You need to install Quicktime 7.3 or higher to use this feature.
CHANGE	C200	Some icons in the Export menu of Ventuz Designer have been updated.
CHANGE	C201	DirectX API's have been switched to SlimDX as the first steps to the x64 version of Ventuz.
CHANGE	C203	All Image Loader have been speed improved for loading TGA images.
CHANGE	C204	Updated validation process of Simple/Timeline Control to improve performance of complex animations.
CHANGE	C206	The DDSLoader node finally got texture size output properties.
CHANGE	C207	The Ticker node provides a new output property QueuedItems. This value shows the number of data items queued in the buffer. It can be used to improve the data update mechanism of your data sources. not applicable in Express Edition
BUG	B319	Datapath video transfers didn't work on some system configurations. Fixed. Professional Edition only
BUG	B320	A calculation precision issue was fixed in the ScrollText node which prevented the start of the scrolling under certain circumstances.
BUG	B322	The Case property of the ValueSwitch node was restricted to 8 in the PropertyEditor. Now it's 4096.
BUG	B323	If the Cluster-Rendering mode was enabled in the Machine Config and no network connection was present the Renderer could not initialize and Ventuz crashed. This is fixed now! not applicable in Express Edition
BUG	B324	Ventuz Remote Shape crashed on startup if no network was present. Fixed! not applicable in Express Edition
BUG	B325	The Text Editor crashed sometimes in syntax highlighting mode (scripts and expressions) - fixed.
BUG	B328	Relative paths (URL) didn't work since the update to .net 2.0. This is fixed now. Use "./file.ext" in any file/asset property to address a file relative to the project, presentation or director file.
BUG	B329	Image Sequence node didn't load files with spaces or other special characters in filename. Fixed!
BUG	B330	On certain systems a file access error prevented to save export parameters for Presentations and Directors. Fixed!
BUG	B331	The Advanced Image Loader loaded textures that were not power-of-2 in size very blurry. Fixed. not applicable in Express Edition
BUG	B332	The Midi Timecode node consumed other Midi messages, so that other Midi Input nodes did not work correctly. Fixed!
BUG	B333	The shading of the Overlay Rectangle was incorrect (with specularity) under certain Vista configurations. Specularity is now disabled by default!
BUG	B334	The Export dialog for Archives/Presentations did not mark all missing resources correctly. Fixed!
BUG	B335	Fixed some bugs in the Performance Statistics display.
BUG	B336	Long channel names in Animation Editor were truncated. Fixed.