feature request Feature Request ? Post here

[Mike Fahl]

being able to add a trigger for the main timeline. An aux timeline can do it but can't be timecoded

 

You can use a single control cue on an aux timeline triggered form the task list to then trigger the main timeline. A bit roundabout, but quite doable.

 

copy and past movie proposerties. Loop / free run / blending modes.... Or select multiples and do it at once.

 

You can copy/paste the cue containing the desired settings, then drag new media onto it. Speeds up the process somewhat when you need to do this over and over.

 

Assign medias in the timeline to tiers and not only layers

 

Cue are assigned to layers, which are in their turn assigned to tiers. Do you mean you want to assigne cues directly to tiers? I veel having one more way to assign tiers than the one we currently have could be quite confusing. As in "why won't that image show up on this display". Adding one more place to look could confuse more people than it may help.

 

Choose a color for a media in the timeline can make it easy to manage heavy programming

 

Yes, I can see how colorizing cues could make it easier to navigate. Assuming you'd actually go to the extra manual effort of actually assigning colors to individual cues. We currently have some colors automatically assigned based on cue type.

 

Mike

[Graphicgeezer]

Hi Chaps

 

My turn,  How about Midi input being able to be mapped to an 'Fxx' key?  so pressing a midi key on a controller you can directly jump to a point of the main timeline?

 

Two benefits:  one there are only 12 'F' keys and you could theoretically have many more, and the buttons are nice and big on the midi controllers  :-))

 

 

Oliver

[jfk]

Hi Chaps

 

My turn,  How about Midi input being able to be mapped to an 'Fxx' key?  so pressing a midi key on a controller you can directly jump to a point of the main timeline?

 

Two benefits:  one there are only 12 'F' keys and you could theoretically have many more, and the buttons are nice and big on the midi controllers  :-))

 

 

Oliver

 

That function exists today by using an auxiliary timeline triggered by a MIDI note input.

Just place one Control Cue on the aux timline with any criteria you would like.

That includes jump to 'Fxx key' in the main timeline, but is not limited to that.

[wiesemann]

Hi all.

 

My wishes would be:

 

- Add kerning in the text-module, like in AfterEffects.

 

- Add the ability to switch the timeline to "real" frames and snap to those

 

- Add stepping in the timeline framewise with some keyboardshortcut. Very often I am asked to show a client some transition/section framewise...

 

- Add "handles" or tabs on the displays on the stage (or maybe a rightclick-dropdown list). When stacking two or more displays exactly on top of each other, it takes time to select and work one of them.

 

- Add a different kind of cues, that can be used for naming/marking areas of the timeline. Call them Markers, Notes or something.

As of now I am using play-cues for that, but they are being loaded into the iphone WO-remote as well and I end up with a whole lot more play/pause cues than actually needed.

 

- Enabling/disabling single cues (like "ctrl B" in FinalCut) to quickly take some thing out of the show temporarily.

 

- Limit export of video/audio to quicktime to the actual screens as an option

 

- Make the dissolve of "standby" a real dissolve between the show and the standby layers. At the present it is fading all layers down and the stby-layer up. This is always visible and irritating.

 

- Save the position/size and arrangement of the production-software window within the project or as seperate setups. At present, when using a second monitor, I have to rearrange after turning off/on.

 

- Make the show folder of a display machine "transportable" in some way. At present they seem to be locked to their original IP-adress.

I wanted to test some things with a show(folder) on a different machine and the iphone-WO-remote, but couldnt because of the different IP-address, I believe.

Maybe by editing a textfile inside that folder?

 

I guess that's all that comes to mind right now.

All the best.

Uwe Wiesemann

[Mike Fahl]

Firstly, thanks for all excellent suggestions. Although we don't always respond, rest assured that we do read and listen. Here are a few comments.

 

- Add kerning in the text-module, like in AfterEffects.

 

The text media should do kerning already for fonts that have kerning pairs specified. It also supports typographic ligatures (somewhat related to kerning) for fonts that have those. Manual kerning is not supported, though, if that's what you meant.

 

 

- Add stepping in the timeline framewise with some keyboardshortcut. Very often I am asked to show a client some transition/section framewise...

 

You can sort-of do this by pressing the control key in conjunction with the scroll wheel. Press shift as well for larger increments (all this from memory - hopefully I recall the modifier keys correctly).

 

- Enabling/disabling single cues (like "ctrl B" in FinalCut) to quickly take some thing out of the show temporarily.

 

You could move such cues to a temporary adjacent conditional layer that's disabled. Not exactly the same thing, but could perhaps help

 

- Limit export of video/audio to quicktime to the actual screens as an option

It will only export the part of screens that are currently visible in the stage window. So you could limit to a smaller area by reducing the size of the window.

 

- Make the show folder of a display machine "transportable" in some way. At present they seem to be locked to their original IP-adress.

 

This is addressed by the "named display computer" feature of the upcoming version 5.5, where you can use assigned display names rather than IP addresses to make the show more easily portable to a different set of display computers.

Mike

[Lloyd Stewart]

Saw this on Facebook this morning and it made me think that perhaps Watchout could somehow do the same thing?

[Jonas Dannert]

Sorry Lloyd,

 

Black level adjustments has to be done in the projector end of things anyway, so I doubt it will help having it inside WATCHOUT...

Nice interface from Panasonic, though.

 

/jonas

[Mike Fahl]

Lloyd, I think it would be quite possible to compensate for black level buildup, if required. Try this:

 

1. Make a gray rectangle, say 250 x 250 pixels, with a few (2-3) pixel wide edges that fade to black.
2. Place one such rectangle between each overlap area on an aux timeline.
3. Add a Scale tween track and adjust the rectangles to precisely fill the dark area between the overlaps.
4. Set all those cues to blend mode "Lighten".
5. Set the aux timeine to render above the blends.
6. Put the aux timeline in Pause, so all those rectangles are displayed on screen
7. Add a "Hue and Saturation" tween track to each cue.
8. Reduce the "Gain" parameter (and possibly "Offset" as well) to get just enough brightness from those rectangles to compensate for the black level build-up in the overlapping areas. 

 

Let's know if it worked out. I think it should. It's somewhat elaborate, but once set up, it should do the job. And in a really dark room, ot could make sense - particularly if you have to use projectors with a poor black level.

 

Mike

[matkeane]

Just wanted to second the post here - http://forum.dataton.com/topic/794-feature-requests-post-here/page-3?do=findComment&comment=2549 - about geometry correction. Mapping is an increasingly frequent request from clients and, with the current interface, things aren't very easy. Being able to see the current Stage view in the geometry display would make it a lot easier to see which point needs to be moved.

 

Ideally, it would be possible to create a new control point at an arbitrary position, rather than subdividing a grid which mostly doesn't quite align with the content, but I guess that's a different feature request. In the meantime, something that stops clients looking over my shoulder and saying "Hey, it's much easier in Madmapper, why aren't you using that?" would be nice.

[MISTERK]

oh and maybe a 64 bit version of watchout ?

 

Ciao

[JACKWEISBERG]

It would be very useful to selectively blur images.

 

your thoughts?

[RBeddig]

Some few thoughts from my side too:

 

Magnetic horizontal and vertical reference lines -

can be useful to accurately position cues inside the stage window without going into the numeric values again and again.

 

Preference switch to deactivate the main timeline completely -

We do not use the main timeline very often anymore. In life situations, if you do not correctly focus on a specific aux timeline window before, hitting the space bar to continue will always run the main timeline. This can be confusing and annoying at times. Maybe the space bar could also be connected to a specific timeline instead to make sure that the right timeline get's fired off.

 

Media Text... duplicate -

when we use the internal text cues, we often want to use the same text with some little changes again and again. Now we have to go into the cue, mark and copy the text, open a new empty text cue , paste the old text into this one and then alter it to change it to the text we need. It would be much easier, if we could just mark a text cue and copy this into a new cue which we could then save under a new name and with different content.

 

Preference switch to deactivate error messages regarding to IP output bing not delivered -

We sometimes use the IP output to send strings to other systems (show control systems, projectors,...). While working on the project, the actual device might not be available and every time the output cue is started, the message window will come forward to tell me that the cue could not be delivered. Would be cool if I could activate/deactivate the output in the settings window or the preferences somewhere to avoid those messages when editing.

 

IP cues sent from specific display computers -

in fixed installations we have the need to report the working condition of all computers in the setup. We sometimes use a string output sent through IP to the show control system to send some sort of "alive" cue every 10, 20 or 30 seconds or so. The problem is that only one of the display computers will send out this string. If any of the other display computers dies it will go unnoticed. I'm aware that I could send the string through the COM port of each computer but this would often involve some extra hardware or at least extra serial wiring and a controller which has enough COM ports for all lines coming in. My idea would be to be able to link a string output (IP) to a specific display in the same way like an audio cue. Just positioning an icon over the correct screen area.

 

MIDI OUT -

we get questions for this very often. There are hardware devices which could translate DMX into MIDI but why not do it directly from WATCHOUT.

 

Import of real 3D objects as cues -

After going into the semi-3D world already it would be time to be able to use real 3D media in our shows.

 

That's all for now...

 

Best regards

 

Rainer

[TomT]

Import of real 3D objects as cues -

to make this complete, the using of Images (png, tif, jpeg, dds and so on) as textures for 3D objects!

[PierreLucB]

Well while we're at it here are a couple I'm sure a fair number of us would like to see.

 

-Live control of elements please. Remove the need for updates.

 

-Automatic connecting and reconnecting (in case of network failure) to production computer as well as auto sync to what is happening in the production computer.

 

-More options to modify medias and their keyframes in groups. Editing of multiple objects and keyframes simultaneously for faster editing.

 

I hope you consider them.

 

Thank you.

[jfk]

Couple of those deserve some clarification ....

 

Well while we're at it here are a couple I'm sure a fair number of us would like to see.

 

-Live control of elements please. Remove the need for updates.

 

This does exist, just not in the form you are asking for.

Live tweens provide live control of elements during the performance playback now.

 

-Automatic connecting and reconnecting (in case of network failure) to production computer as well as auto sync to what is happening in the production computer. ...

 

This exists under cluster control which is normally associated with the playback / delivery of the show.

Under watchmaker control, i.e. show assembly, the programmer determines when to reconnect a display.

Has been that way since v2.

[nikolai]

This post is getting veeery long and is clearly a hot topic. I would suggest that Dataton got them self an account at UserVoice.com or similar. That way it would be easier to see what the users really want/need. and we could vote on each others wishes and discuss each feature separately.

Please check it out Dataton:

http://feedback.uservoice.com/forums/1-general-feedback

 

Back on topic:

About the 3d import suggestions. Isn't that asking a bit too much? 

Maybe I'm thinking of this the wrong way or have a lack of imagination, but are you guys talking about realtime rendering of 3d graphics?

Personally, to be honest, I think that that would bloat watchout. and that the performance/ reder-quality would never be good enough to rival pre-rendered clips

 

I would be a party killer here and say please focus on making the user interface 2013 compatible and a lot faster to work with. Focus on improving what is already there and adding simple things like real time changes when moving objects and editing tweens. Simple filters like blur and vector masks. (see my previous posts)

[Pertti Jaasaari]

Many of these have been already covered, but here's my list of most urgent needs:

 

1. Ability to change the in-point value by dragging the front of the cue. Perhaps dragging from the top left corner?

 

2. The countdown cue. (#1 would give us a quite fast and convenient way to accomplish this...)

EDIT: Perhaps the new text-cue with a little bit of code doing the math and displaying the result could be possible?

 

3. Live editable bezier masks on output. Or even sharp cornered to begin with...

 

4. Ability to change color of cues on timeline and possibly different default colors for different media types (still image, video sound, composition...)

 

5. Duplication of compositions.

 

6. Stage tier management (delete)

 

7. Editable name for text cues.

 

8. Option to set ID number for aux timelines and use that as a target in control cues instead of the name. When duplicating the timeline, the copy should have a new free ID number assigned automatically. This way we could use the name for describing the content of the timeline and have the possibility to edit that without messing up programming.

 

9. Ability to move things on stage window with arrow keys instead of typing in numbers, and the result should be immediately seen in output without Ctrl-D. Some kind of live-edit mode to do position, scale and rotation adjustments that are visible on the outputs in real time is definately needed. Video could be freezed if that would save some processing power.

 

10. Ability to change the name of aux timeline directly in Task -window.

 

11. When opening the aux timeline properties (Ctrl-J) name should be highlighted by default, not Time Position.

 

12. Some quicker way to do the opacity tweens and cross dissolves. Perhaps dragging the end of a cue with a key pressed down (alt, ctrl, whatever). Overlapping the cues on a same layer could make a cross dissolve, but then some way of defining the z-order is needed... 

 

13. Overall focus on making the editing process faster, especially on repetitive tasks. The less I have to manually select input fields and add numbers, press OK, then press Ctrl-D and then all over again until it looks right, the happier I am at the end of a long client driven night :-D

 

14. Some kind of sync utility between files in project folder and things in my media window. For most of my shows the folder structure is exactly the same so adding new media items should not be manual. Perhaps Ctrl-R could ask if I want to import new media as well.

 

I have been using Watchout since the first launch and for most parts I'm very happy with the product. But it is the small and sometimes so frustrating little things that make me pull my hair out in the middle of the night. So instead of fancy new features that might be nice things to demo at a trade fair like real time 3D objects, I would like to see improvements in making the every day bread and butter show programming faster.

 

Oh yes, and for the last part, my biggest wish:

 

15. Automatic conversion of video to Mpeg2 and H264. This might be a licensing thing that would increase the price but I would be happy to pay for it. For 99% of the videos (from the top of my hat) I'm using the same parameters for encoding the video all the time. I would love to be able just to drop the video in to media folder and have Watchout encode it for me automatically in background and not doing that one extra step in AME or TmpgEnc. Support for image sequences here would fit my production pipeline perfectly.

[Pertti Jaasaari]

One more thing:

 

Better task list utility for tasks would make running the aux timelines easier as most of show programming is becoming divided into lots of aux timelines instead of one massive main timeline. I would like to sort my aux timelines top down in playing order and manage their z-order separately. Perhaps a new "Aux timelines" -window should do the creation and z-organizing part, and Tasks window should be the place to set the play order and triggering. 

 

A couple of features on the task list could come handy:

- adjustable fade in and out times, like in stand-by mode, for each task (would be great without need for Ctrl+D) 

- start button for starting the timeline as it is now, but the optional fade in/out time

- advance button to continue if there is a pause in aux timeline (no fades here)

- mute / unmute button using the optional fade in/out time (doesn't stop the timeline)

- stop / rewind / reset button using the optional fade in/out time

- a clear color scheme or indicators to show which tasks are finished (green?), which are active (yellow?) and black for those still not played (or have been reset).

- editable text field for short description in each task

- automatic task numbering

 

EDIT:

- a "trigger next task" -control cue in aux timeline that would trigger automatically the next task in list could be useful. 

[Pertti Jaasaari]

And again one more as these things pop into my mind while programming a show :-D

 

Ability to play back the timelines backwards would be a killer feature. In this case video cues should still play forward (or optionally be ingnored) but all tweens and such should play backwards. On gigs where the presenter is controlling the show with a remote, need for this comes up almost every time. 

[PierreLucB]

To follow up.

 

PierreLucB, on 25 Jul 2013 - 20:40, said:

 

Well while we're at it here are a couple I'm sure a fair number of us would like to see.

 

-Live control of elements please. Remove the need for updates.

 

This does exist, just not in the form you are asking for.

Live tweens provide live control of elements during the performance playback now.

 

Yes I am aware of this feature but, as you understood, what I'm suggesting here is a completely different subject matter. It think it would be great to see modifications made to the timeline apply in real time to the display computers. It would save a lot of time and be very practical.

Live tweens, to me, are for very specific and quite rare occasions. I would not use this for a whole show as you have to apply this effects to each parameters of each media. Doing this for a whole show would be very time consuming. This also does not achieve what I'm looking for.

 

PierreLucB, on 25 Jul 2013 - 20:40, said:

 

-Automatic connecting and reconnecting (in case of network failure) to production computer as well as auto sync to what is happening in the production computer. ...

 

This exists under cluster control which is normally associated with the playback / delivery of the show.

Under watchmaker control, i.e. show assembly, the programmer determines when to reconnect a display.

Has been that way since v2.

 

Good to know, I shall give it a try but I think such feature would also be useful in Production / Display mode. I've used Watchout numerous times on very different kinds of shows from medium to very large scale (Live shows, TV Shows, Permanent installations, Museums) and I've never used the cluster mode. Yes even for the permanent installations. That is because:

1-It is simpler this way.

2-It is faster ( a lot of time, last minute modification are needed )

3-It gives good visual feedback of what is going on (which can be very useful both for the programmer/operator as well as newer operators that don't know all the details but might need to troubleshoot or make modifications)

4-It give a stand alone mode (does not require external triggering systems)

 

Speed and ease of use are key factors to products and I think the Production / Display setup achieves this a lot more than the Cluster mode which is why I am suggesting this one.

 

Just to be clear, what I (and everyone else) are saying here are propositions, suggestions to make your softwares and products better and more fun to use. I think this is a case of a win-win situation here. If a feature requested by users make it into a future version of the product, the users are then satisfied and encouraged to continue to use the product but it also makes your product better for everybody! Thus making it more enjoyable for everyone. This means more potential customers will want to use it. End result, everybody wins. Products are made for the users so I think it's a good idea to listen and understand the ideas and needs of the users.

 

My thoughts.

Thank you for your time.

[Sebastian]

Hi,

 

1. It would be great if it possible to change movie playback speed. And the best will be if this "parameter" we can add like tween which can be external controlled like the rest of tween parameters now.

2. Add internal variables, which value we can change like DMX outputs and using it to control tween parameters like input variables. 

 

Best regards,

[Mike Fahl]

Add internal variables, which value we can change like DMX outputs and using it to control tween parameters like input variables. 

Isn't that what the Generic Input does? Please clarify.

 

Mike

[kkimsato]

Here is idea.  make timeline like Aftereffect timline with tabs to go next timeline.

reason is this, When you have many presentors  all on different timelines open in GUI it is hard to dig down to find the right one. I know,  doublle click in Task window to bring is up but when you have several open they start covering the stage and Media windows. So to have all alt timeline show as tab in main timeline , much clear i think.

Thank you

[cowboyclint]

I know this list keeps getting longer and longer, but here's another.

Could we have a MIDI/MSC toggle keyboard shortcut that would activate/deactivate MIDI/MSC inside watchout?

When the Lighting Designer is jumping around doing notes, it's a real pain. The console can turn it off, but I would like to inside Watchout.

Also, a little RED/GREEN button that shows whether it is toggled on and off.

[UnitCone]

15. a command like "repeat the last command" would fast programming when you have to change the same feature in many different cues