newmethos

Excited that Watchout 7 is out in the world and that we can start exploring how to bring its new capabilities into our work. One fairly urgent matter for me, working frequently in American regional theaters, is the matter of show control, either MSC or OSC (ideally both, OSC functionality's inclusion in Watchout 7 is a huge win). At the moment, it does not seem like MSC or OSC (not from Eos or any other OSC source) can control any timeline in Watchout 7. What is the timeline for the inclusion of this feature? I know just having an operator advance cues seems like a natural solution, but lots of theaters do not have experienced video folks who can serve as operators and having LX trigger the projections is a major selling point for Watchout, so on the shows that I will be engineering/programming my solution will likely be to use TouchDesigner to receive the OSC coming off of the lighting console and translate that to Watchout's remote control protocol (that used to be a bit iffy because it was UDP based, not exactly missional critical territory to just drop some cue go triggers, but both Eos and TouchDesigner can do OSC over TCP, which will minimize that stuff). How are folks working around this at the moment?

Thanks for the response! This was also the consensus on the Watchout group on Facebook. Fortunately, it was a very recent ShowSage build and restoring the original image seems to have solved the problem and we had very little to do to get back to show speed. Erin

Hello! We are running Watchout 6.6.5 on very nearly freshly minted servers from Show Sage (first deployed in a December, a few short months ago). They are running Windows 10 and I generally trust ShowSage to have thoroughly implemented the recommended tweaks (though I can certainly run through it again if that's the recommendation). We are routinely experiencing this "A new guard page for the stack cannot be created" error on the Watchout production machine. It is generally preceded by a couple of updates where changes have been made do not appear on stage and the layers no longer stack correctly, then the error message, followed by a hard crash (though not one hard enough to generate a dump file). The Google searches for this error are all over the place, though it usually involves some kind of memory leak that eventually leads to a crash across a number of programs and it's not solely related even to image processing applications. Has anyone else had any experience with this or have any recommendations for solving it? The crashes are frequent enough to be quite disruptive to programming. Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated. Erin

NewTek recommends the DHCP based set up for the PTZ1 in the manual. My normal instinct is to manage IP addresses as well, but as it happens, the managed switch we are using also prefers getting it's address from an existing DHCP server and we had to have a wireless router anyway, so that wasn't a problem (using the managed switch and multicasting the camera feeds is how I was planning on keeping the network overhead for the two cameras to a minimum). I didn't have these troubles with all NDI streams, just the ones from the PTZ1s so this remains extra frustrating. I am hoping that the restore to ShowSage images takes care of a lot of these problems. Thanks for the input.

Hello! I recently worked on a show that was meant to feature live feeds from 2 Newtek PTZ1 cameras. The process was so unstable that the effect had to be cut, but there were a lot of challenges to the setup, so I'm wondering if there are some fixes that we can proceed with to enable their use in the next show (they purchased the cameras specifically at my recommendation because of the integration with NDI and Watchout). The specific problem that kept occurring was the when the playhead hit the camera in the main timeline, the display would get behind, taking nearly a second to put the image out, losing all the information from an opacity tween and just popping on, the stream would freeze and then the display software would crash. It eventually would come back as the display program restored. Sometimes there would be a notification that the Radeon driver had crashed, but there would always be a notification that the software had crashed (that's annoying because to the best of my knowledge all User Account Control notifications had been turned off). The display machines and the production computers were built by ShowSage and they are using the FirePro W7100 running Windows 7, though the production computer was running Windows 10. I installed the latest Radeon drivers and was running Watchout 6.6.2. The PTZ1s were in DHCP mode and there was a Synology router handing out IP addresses for the cameras and the Netgear managed switch. No other programs had trouble with the NDI streams from the cameras, NDI's monitor software picked it up on my Mac and on the production computer and OBS never had a problem either, just Watchout. And even the NDI stream coming from OBS was not a problem (we were running AirServer to capture a livestream from an actor operated iPod), EXCEPT when that stream originate from the PTZ1, which was quite frustrating (I was hoping to switch from the NDI-HX coming off the camera to a full NDI from OBS, but didn't having time really mess around with making sure that's what happened in OBS). I also had no trouble streaming live from the Datapath HDMI capture cards. Is the PTZ1 actually compatible with Watchout? Are there particular tweaks to making sure the NDI stream they create is more compatible with Watchout? There are several extenuating circumstances here that could have messed this up, not the least of which is that in the process of acquiring the license for AirServer, the production computer caught a Windows update that turned some of the Windows Firewall features back on (that was devious of Windows and very frustrating to fix) and the backup computer had a severe enough networking issue that we had to send it back to ShowSage for repair, so this was far from an optimized computing situation and when I work with the company again, I'm going to have them start from ShowSage's completely clean image, but I would love to know if there was something else I could have done to solve this issue.