Step one:
Drag the mute folder from the CD onto your hard drive.
Step two:
Plug in a projector to a spare monitor port.
Step three:
Open display settings (Start > Settings > Control Panel > Display) select the projector and tick Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor and Use this device as the primary monitor. Also change the of the projector to its lowest value, usually 640x480.
Step four (optional):
If you have a graphics cards such as a NVIDIA Geforce, you can use the supplied utility to set the resolution as low as 320x240. Mute will accept any resolution as long as this ratio is maintained but performance will suffer the higher you choose.
Step four:
Double click mute.exe, drag the output window to the projector and select View > Fullscreen (ctrl+f).
Step five (optional):
Put on some music to mix too. It is recommended that you use an separate computer/cd player to play your music as it can effect performance.
** Note:
If you don't have a projector at hand, simple double click mute.exe and close the output window. You can still experiment with the Mute interface using the preview window. If you have a scan converter (hardware that can output a section of a screen) you can get a greater level of performance using this setup. Performance can also be improved by shutting down all non-essential applications and services.
Mute has a very simple mechanism for letting you use your own videos/images. Simply copy your SWF`s and JPEGS into the Library folder (below-left) found within your mute installation folder (for example: c:/mute/Library). Each folder represents a playlist, you can create and delete new folders.The next time you start Mute, the menus are automatically generated (below-right), filtered for appropriate file extensions and sorted alphabetically.
You should create your videos at the same size as the resolution you intend to output to. Although Mute will always scale to any resolution,320x240 is recommended for optimum performance.
Click on the image below to view a full sized version.
Watching the provided video help tutorial found in the installation folder (eg. c:/mute/Video tutorial) will also give you a good overview of the mute interface.
Useful things to remember:
- A maximum of three filters per channel can be applied at any one time.
- A filter cannot be applied to the same channel more than once.
- Channel one has the highest depth, channel three the lowest.
- If performance is suffering, remove filters and turn off channels you are not using.
- Context sensitive help information can be viewed in the help panel by moving your cursor over each interface element.