A broken file should never take the show down.
The clip plays fine on your laptop at home. At the gig it freezes, stutters or refuses to open — in front of a full room. Almost always, the problem was already inside the file before you left the house.
Why files fail live
- Incomplete copies. A pen drive pulled out too early leaves a file that has a name, a size and a missing ending.
- The same extension, a different file. Two files ending in .mov or .mkv can hold completely different codecs, bit depths and colour formats. The extension says very little.
- Codecs your player does not decode. Some professional formats, made for editing or for other playback systems, are heavy or simply unsupported in a given live player.
- No reliable clock. Files with missing duration or a variable frame rate can drift, jump or confuse a timeline.
- Oversized material. A clip far above the output resolution costs decoding time on every frame and gives the audience nothing extra.
Prepare the library before the gig
- Convert once, at home. Pick one format your player handles comfortably and bring everything to it before the show, not during it.
- Match the size to the screen. Material at the output resolution looks the same and is lighter to play.
- Copy, then verify. Open every file from the copy you will actually use at the venue, not from the original.
- Keep a known-good fallback. One clip that always plays, one keystroke away.
What LumaDeck Pro does before a file plays
LumaDeck Pro checks every video outside the performance engine before it can reach a pad, the timeline or the stage: it measures the file and decodes a frame. A damaged or unreadable file is refused with the reason written down, and the booth keeps running.
Each file ends up on one of three paths:
- Direct. It is inside the proven playback matrix and goes straight to the booth.
- Prepare. It is valid, but outside that matrix: LumaDeck Pro tells you, and you convert it once into a playback copy from the File menu.
- Refused. It cannot be opened safely, and you see why.
Variable frame rate is detected and flagged. A file the check cannot confirm in time is not played blind. Before doors, the pre-flight check also confirms that the media your show needs is present.
What plays straight away
- Ready to play: 8-bit H.264 in MP4, and VP8, VP9 or AV1 in WebM, up to 4K UHD.
- Layered visuals keep their transparency through WebM.
- ProRes and other professional masters are prepared once into a playback copy, and the original file stays untouched.
LumaDeck Pro checks the file before the crowd sees it — and keeps the booth running when a file is bad.
LumaDeck Pro