Recently, Chaos released Chaos Player, an image sequence player designed for fast and smooth playback. The product is available as stand-alone version or with V-Ray Collection. An in-house developed product, Chaos Player is the successor to Pdplayer, a product previously developed by Asynthetic and distributed by Chaos and its network of resellers, the company says. The Chaos Player has features like basic compositing, color grading, and editing in realtime. Other features include the ability to playback image sequences, A/B wipe compare, export to MP4, command line support, etc. The player is available for 30-day free trial. Chaos Player is available for $99 per year. With V-Ray Collection, it is available for $699 per year. For which the user gets free access to all 15 products in V-Ray Collection. However, Chaos Player can be used to review rendered animation output from any application.

Chaos has discontinued the sale of Pdplayer; however, customer support for Pdplayer will continue until January 2023. There won’t be any further product updates. The company says that customers who own a Pdplayer perpetual license purchased in 2021 are entitled to a free Chaos Player annual license for each Pdplayer license they have.

The company press release is as follows:

New Chaos Player Added to V-Ray Collection

Powerful image sequence player joins high-end visualization suite

Chaos adds Chaos Player, its fast-loading image sequence player, to V-Ray Collection, giving artists and designers access to 15 high-end visualization products from a single license. To further elevate VFX and animation workflows, the feature set is also expanding to include floating-point compositing, A/B wipes, OpenColorIO (OCIO) v2 support and more, making a fast product even more attuned to the needs of high-end productions.

“When it’s time to review animation, you don’t want to jump through a bunch of hoops to see it in action,” said Alexander Yolov, product manager at Chaos. “With Chaos Player, both animators and supervisors can playback high-resolution sequences almost instantaneously, so they can make decisions on the fly.”

Chaos Player (formerly Pdplayer) delivers smooth playback of ultra-high-definition image sequences, so 3D artists, animators and supervisors can review and rapidly approve animations. Today, Chaos Player supports all industry-standard image formats—including multichannel EXR renders—and brings live multilayer compositing, interactive color adjustments and collaborative markup tools into a single standalone application.

“Chaos Player is part of our daily workflow for nearly every project that comes through our door, as it’s always saving us time, whether we are working on feature films or streaming content from Netflix and HBO,“ said Dmitry Vinnik, technical director at Silhouette Images. “The ability to load multiple 4K multichannel EXR sequences at once and cycle through layers is absolutely crucial to our team. At every stage there seems to be another little feature that helps, whether it’s switching aspect ratios or converting files. It all adds up.”

Chaos Player now includes:

• Floating-point compositing — Supports layered compositing of 32-bit, high-dynamic range image sequences with real-time playback.
• A/B wipes — Animators can now compare up to four versions of a shot in playback in real time.
• MP4 video support — Edits, compositions and frame sequences can now be exported to MP4.
• OCIO v2 support — The latest version of one of visual effects’ most commonly used color management solutions now has full support in Chaos Player.
• High-DPI interface — The UI is now fully compatible with high-density and high-resolution displays.

To learn more about the new features, please visit the Chaos Player product page.

Pricing and availability

Chaos Player is available now for Linux, MacOS and Windows. It can be purchased through an annual subscription, priced at $99, or through V-Ray Collection, an annual plan that gives users full access to 15 Chaos products and services for $699/year.