callum

Hi all, I am just wanting to follow up on this, does anyone have any experience with the domeprojection app, I'm just trying to understand what steps in the 3d process it does and therefore how that data feeds into Watchout. Can I give it a 3D model of my space, let it do the calibrations and then it feeds that to Watchout as both a corrected/deformed 3D model+plus projector data, or does it then feed a projector list including their warping settings for watchout to then correctly align to the original 3D model? Cheers!

Hi all, sorry to resurrect a very old thread but can anyone confirm whether this is still the case, you can only output from 1x GPU with watch out. Many Thanks

If you're doing say an install project with Watchout, you can drive the display via IP control. This is done by firstly enabling TCP/IP control in the settings of the production machine. There is a good detailed writeup in the back of the manual of all the different commands you can send. You can then connect to the display (when production is offline) using Telnet and send a command along the lines of: "load *NameOfShowFile* true true" (Check the manual for the exact wording).

Hi iisinsane, we have a production running currently with similar set-up (MOTU UltraLike MK4s, selected as ASIO devices in the display software) and are experiencing popping on the outputs consistent with buffer issues. Can I ask what kind of settings you have on your devices? Specifically buffer setting?

Hi all. Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but interestingly I am experiencing the same issue on Watchout 6.4. When importing a video file encoded as HAP or proRes with embedded audio it is identified as an audio file (just like above). When I attempt to play it (to see what happens) it throws the same error described (QuickTime error: -2095 ). If I strip out the audio it plays happily. The audio is stream is 0, the video stream 1. When I use ffmpeg to swap the streams around (video stream 0, audio stream 1) it does recognise it as a video and play the video component but no audio (interestingly, it can see there's audio there as it has the Output Channel Assignment tab visible on this video. Does anyone know if the issue discussed above is a bug? I don't really have any problems with stripping audio into a different file, just on other some playback platforms I've used (QLAB) it is pretty crucial that the video has an embedded audio file to prevent sync drift between clips, so it's more a force of habit.

Thanks, yep that's my go-to tool on the mac, nice and simple and works well! Would be nice if it just tied into FCPX though haha!

Thanks all. I have experience with HAP and D3 and have consistently been impressed by it. I always find it a bit of a pain transcoding things to HAP on a mac from Final Cut/compressor. But if it's the clear winner than I should really start getting used to it!

Hi all, I've done a few shows on Watchout and recently started conversation with a client to start on another show. By default I've always told the client that content needs to be ProRes 422. Recently I was thinking is that really still the best format for Watchout? Does anyone find they have a go-to format/codec for playback of simple 1080p video clips? This would be running on standard 1080p outputs from intel based PCs running Win10 pro, NVIDIA Quadro M4000 GPUs and all Watchout optimisations performed. The manual kind of lists every supported format but there's no real "We recommend X for the most stable playback". Happy to hear anyone's thoughts!

Hi all, Not to resurect an old thread but I seem to be having a similar issue with some of my display machines as well! The computers only have 2 items in the startup folder, codemeter and a shortcut to watchpoint.exe (with some parameters such as a showfile directory) Recently when I start the computers the watchpoint software appears to start but then shortly after minimizes to the tray. There are then 2 sets of Watchout icons on the task-bar. We fix this by closing the applications and then re-launching it from the start-up folder. When I am on-site next I am planning to check if there's anything in the run shell:startup section that is un-needed. Just wanted to see if anyone had encountered this recently with the latest release. Cheers

Hi All, Have a very similar question to this and I thought I'd resurrect an old forum thread (in addition to contacting support) We have a theatre show where I want every cue on the main timeline to be externally triggered from MSC but I also want some additional cues to be triggered on aux. timelines (i.e. a close-shutter command). Does the Main-timeline have a cue-list ID of some sort (and can this be changed?) as it appears in ETC world everything comes with a Cue-List number. So if I map cue lists to aux. timelines it ultimately doesn't map to the main timeline (as the main show cue-lists in ETC world, still has a list number (of 1).

Interesting. I certainly aim to run my system with all my displays configured correctly but on this show I've got 16 outputs spread across 4 computers and didn't noticed one have an incorrect frame-rate on one of the outputs in windows. It would be useful if the software was able to generate a more helpful error message (like "Verify displays configured in Windows OS match display settings in Watchout") but Ultimately I'm guessing Watchout itself isn't getting a very helpful error message from the VNC system to identify what's gone wrong. None the less I thought I'd share my observations with the forum to let a future-me save a bit of stress not being able to get their remote access up and running.

Hi All, Just thought I'd share a bit of a helpful finding (as I couldn't find any info before) re. connecting to display PCs via the in-built remote access. I was unable to connect to my display PC and was getting the error "Can't establish remote access connection" If the external displays on your display machine are at a different resolution/frequency to your Watchout show-file (I know this isn't great practice, I just hadn't noticed apart from this remote access issues!). Watchout just changes the external display settings to match the show-file when you take it online. When you remotely connect it looks like the exiting from full-screen causes the system to go back to the OS-resolutions, not the Watchout resolutions/frequencies. The fix for this is to make sure all your displays are running the same settings as they do in the workspace. I'm not really expecting any sort of tips/input here but I though I'd better share it given someone in the future may run into this problem. Cheers Cal!

I'm going to resurrect a fairly old thread to say Matkean's really got a strong point here. Looping (also probably considered vamping) is a fairly commonly requested feature now, being apple to set the loop in and out point on a clip would be useful. That way if you have the clip on the timeline and the pause marker on the timeline lines up with the loop point, the clip would keep looping on that section. I have a theatre show coming up that won't have a video operator on crew (the system will run as a cluster taking MSC without an production PC) and some of these convoluted suggestions of DMX loopback just really don't give me confidence that they're going to reliably work show after show for months on end.

Oh very exciting! I haven't seen this before! (I can see this turning out to be a really bad idea) but is there a way to switch between layouts from the timeline? It would be nifty if it changed stage views between acts as I only use certain displays for certain acts.

Hi All, Bit of an interesting question. Does anyone know if Watchout supports some sort of stage view presets? My show has several surfaces which are placed far apart from each other on the stage (it's a long story as to why!) and as a result in my show I have my stage window zoomed quite far out (using control-shift-D) for most of the show only certain screens are active (i.e. very rarely are all screens showing content) I'd love to have in my file, a set of 'stage presets' i.e. one view zoomed on screen A, another view zoomed on screen B. and build into my timeline a bunch of points where the view changes. Does anyone have any experience with doing something like this (/is this even possible?) Would love to hear your thoughts! Cal

I second David's thanks! This is a very interesting software 'feature' to know about. I would have always thought that for art net to be valid it must output channels 1 to 512

Hi Pierre I have only seen it on this specific show file, interestingly enough this would be a fairly old show file. It was given to me as part of a theatre tour; so I don't actually know who created it when! What I find most interesting is some items on my timeline may be 'cursed' as I call them, but if I add the item again elsewhere on the timeline, the new but duplicate item will be okay. In my old software development days I would see something like this as some sort of overflow where a wrongly placed character thinks the receiving application thinks the 'message' ended (i.e. by seeing an ' apostrophe it thinks the message is over) and then gets confused about all the subsequent data which is still coming in!

Oh man. I get this error as well! specifically when the system is running in live-update mode and only when editing the properties of certain timeline objects, some images/videos and others cause this bug by me changing a single property of the clip! It always gives you the impression that the severity of the error is high, but simply taking the show off-line and online restores operation. However the bug remains for those clips! Very strange. Interestingly if you read the sequence of messages (specifically the command it appears to not recognise) it almost looks like normal Watchout data is being sent to the Display and some part of the message is wrong causing the whole transfer of info to fall apart! Would be very interesting to know if anyone at Dataton has seen this, as it's always interested me. But as I use this particular show file only ocasionaly in a theatre production, it isn't frustrating enough to contact them directly! ? My network setup is essentially 1 prod, 2 displays, 2 projectors, some blackmagic switching gear and that's it. No more than about 10 items in total!

I fully support this. Working as the Watchout programmer on theatre shows, I feel like half my job on rehearsals and plotting is just acting as a manual 'tracking console' to move Watchout back when a previous LX cue is run! I imagine there'd be some serious complexities to this but tracking is a pretty fundamental concept in theatre lighting.

Hi all from Australia, I just had a question similar to the attached post below from 2013 but this is a bit outdated now. We're doing a bit of work in musical theatre where the Watchout system is run without operator supervision it just takes MIDI inputs, if there's an issue the LX operator will use a BlackMagic Videohub control panel to switch the projectors to the backup system via a matrix. We'd love to find a panel with a similar form factor to the Blackmagic Videohub panel which can can be programmed to send TCP/IP strings to various systems, i.e. PJLink to the projectors, Telnet to the Watchout displays, Telnet to various video routing gear. Does anyone have any experience with equipment like this, I have looked at building something with a Raspberry pi but I just don't have enough faith in something like that for pro musical theatre where this would be essentially a very show-critical piece of equipment. Thanks in advanced everyone!

Hello, I'm not sure what this forum upgrade was but essentially since your post, I am now receiving Emails every time a new post is made on the watchout forum. I have gone into my account settings to turn these notifications off, but the emails seem to continue to come through. I suspect I'm doing something wrong, but I wasn't sure if you could shed some light on this.

Wow this is really interesting, I had no idea this was the case. Very useful to know as different cast members tend to deliver lines at different timings, so being able to have different control cues for them is very helpful.

Hi all, Just thought I'd give everyone a quick update on this project. Your advice all helped me greatly, I have all the different cast members set as different conditional layers in a composite clip. I've then developed a PHP control system that allows the operator to select the cast members performing for that show, the control system then sends the relevant telnet commands to different display systems to take the show-file online with the conditional value. All the best with your shows and hopefully my post is helpful to someone who has a project like this in the future!

Hi All, apologies for the delay. I just wanted to let everyone know following JFK's reply and talks with the Australian vendor we essentially put it down to some other devices on the network causing too much traffic and moved them off to a totally seperate network. This appears to have resolved this issue. I also changed some of the programming to put a bit more breathing room between play & pause cues to reduce the impact of it overrunning if it were to ever happen again.

Thanks jfk. That’s the current running theory as I saw in the manual they sync via LAN (in show mode there’s no production PC active). We have some KVMs in the network for controlling other gear and they generate a lot of UDP activity (albeit on a different IP subnet). We are going to move these ‘noisy’ broadcast based devices to a different physical network so all we have in the network is the display PCs