RV has been created to support digital artists, directors, supervisors, and production crews who need reliable, flexible, high-performance tools to review image sequences, movie files, and audio. RV has been designed to let users load, play, inspect, navigate, and edit image sequences and audio as simply and directly as possible.
RV is built from Open RV, an Open Source project part of the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF). The ASWF hosts several projects used by the motion picture industry, such as OpenColourIO or OpenTimelineIO. You can find these, and more, on their projects page.
The documentation hosted on this site (knowledge.autodesk.com) covers only RV-specific features.
| RV-specific Documentation | Description |
|---|---|
| RV and VFX Platform Requirements | The VFX Reference platform components required for best RV performances. |
| How to Install and Configure RV | Install and configure RV to use it with Flow Production Tracking. |
| Supported File Formats | The file formats supported by RV. |
| RV SDI Manual | SDI in RV, and how to use it with AJA and Blackmagic Design hardware. |
| Live Review in RV (Beta) | Live Review(beta) and create a shared review session. |
| RV Legacy Licenses | Information for sites that still use stand-alone or floating licenses. |
The documentation hosted on ReadTheDocs.io applies to both RV and Open RV.
| Open RV | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| User Guide | How to use RV. | |
| Reference documentation | How to customize RV. |
The Open RV documentation also covers topics like GTO, LUTs, Multiple Media Representation, Mu, and RV packages, such as OTIO Reader.
While RV and Open RV share the same core features (see the feature differentiation list), RV does support the following features that aren't available to Open RV.
| Feature | RV | Open RV | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| Optimized Playback | Y | Y | |
| UI | Y | Y | |
| Presentation Mode | SDI/DVI/HDMI | DVI/HDMI | RV supports AJA or Blackmagic Design. Open RV does not support SDI. |
| Audio/Video Codecs & Formats | Y | Limited | RV supports a wide-range of images, videos, and audio formats. Contrary to Open RV, RV supports formats that require commercial agreements. |
| RV Sync | Y | Y | |
| Annotation Tools | Y | Y | |
| OCIO Color Management | Y | Y | Note: RV 2024 supports OCIO v2, but is limited to the legacy API of OCIO v1. |
| OTIO Support | Y | Y | |
| Flow Production Tracking Integration | Y | N | RV connects to Flow Production Tracking, and works with RV Screening Room and Flow Production Tracking Toolkit integration. |
| RV command line Tools (RVIO, RVLS) | Y | Y | |
| Customization with APIs (Mu, Python) | Y | Y | |
| IO plug-in API | Y | Y | |
| Window, Linux, macOS | Y | Y | |
| Downloadable executable | Y | N | RV comes as an executable available from the Flow Production Tracking site. |
| Technical Product Support | Y | N | Autodesk technical product support is available only to users of RV. Open RV is supported through the ASWF community project. |
RV supports a wide range of images, videos, and audio formats. Encoders or decoders that require a commercial license to be used are available to RV. The following is a non exhaustive list of formats not available in Open RV but present in RV:
Open RV is limited in the decoding and encoding of images, video, and audio formats. Any encoder or decoder that requires a commercial license to be used is not available in Open RV.
For more information about supported file formats in RV, see Supported File Formats.
RV supports the SDI presentation mode, in addition to DVI/HDMI, and supports AJA and Blackmagic Design hardware.
Open RV can only access the DVI/HDMI presentation modes.
For more information about SDI and AJA or Blackmagic Design in RV, see RV SDI Manual.
RV integrates with Flow Production Tracking and has access to RV Screening Room and Toolkit (TK) Integration.
Open RV does not integrate with Flow Production Tracking. It does not have the required components for the connection and authentication into Flow Production Tracking.
For more information about Flow Production Tracking, see How to Install and Configure RV.
Open RV source code, license, and documentation are hosted at the ASWF repository: