Mike Fahl

Timecode is preferable to MIDI (note, controller) or other control protocols if the goal is to keep the WATCHOUT timeline in precise lock-step with the timeline of another system. If so, this other system provides a timecode feed wich is received and accurately tracked by WATCHOUT. This can not really be accomplished by any of the other means of control. The other methods are more geared towards triggering actions in WATCHOUT from external source. Once triggere, each action runs on the internal WATCHOUT timing. This provides a great deal of flexibility, but is not intended to time-lock the WATCHOUT actions to parallell flows of events in other systems, the way timecode is. So you need to have a good understanding of both the other system(s) and WATCHOUT, as well as the ultimate goal of their integration, in order to choose the best method for connecting the systems together. Hope this helps. Mike

CS6 is pretty flexible in terms of encoding options. What's the size and framerate of your video? If it's withint HD or less, and isn't "odd" in any particular way, you should be able to use either MPEG-2 or H.264 encoding. Mike

We've been using the Korg Nano series quite a lot lately. They have a number of different configurations. They're really small and we haven't had any trouble with them. Just my personal opinion - not an official endorsement. Mike

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

Is this a problem you've had all along on these machines, or has it started to accur recently? Is it one particular computer that fails in this way, or can it be any of your display computers? Mike

I suspect there's some confusion of terms here. There's no such thing as "Generic midi in watchout". There's a Generic input, and there are two kinds of MIDI inputs (Note and Contrinuous Controller). The Generic input has nothing to do with MIDI. Mike

First, about the "slow upoads" some have experienced on and off since Win7 was released. This seems to have become much less of an issue lately. I used to see it myself every now and then earlier, but haven't seen it at all now for almost a year. Nor have I heard about anyone experiencing this problem recently. I've never seen it under XP. Note that we haven't changed anything in WATCHOUT to "fix" this. If the problem has indeed gone away, that must be due to changes in recent OS updates. As to funky switches, we ran into another wierd problem last week. Using one particular laptop and one particular switch (a managed netgear switch), we had serious problems making a connection from the production computer to the cluster. It was often very slow in connecting. Sometimes it resulted in a spew of hundreds of error messages in the message window. I connected an old XP computers to the same switch, and loaded the same show. No problem. We switched the laptop that had previously had the problem over to wireless, and unplugged the Ethernet wire. No problem. We went back to Ethernet, and had the problem again. We then moved the other end of the Ethernet cable form the managed switch to another unmanaged switch on the same network. No problem. So, yes, the kind of switch you use can make a difference. In this case it was that particular switch in conjunction with that particular laptop. Go figure... Mike

Seems like a nice app. But how does it relate to MIDI? I get the impression it connects to WATCHOUT using its network protocol rather than MIDI. Mike

Yes, this is a windows issue. The only possible work-around I've heard of is some AMD software, that allows you to "lock" this display utput number assignment. I believe this applies only to their FirePro line of cards, though. If not, you will just have to adapt your programming to the way Windows decides to number your displays. Mike

I have a hard time undertanding what you want to accomplish. Perhaps you'd get better answers if you describe your problem more clearly.

To the original poster; Note that you must enable external control on the Control page in Preferences for this to work. Mike

nikolai and kilic, many thanks for all your excellent suggestions! Just few breif comments. Yes, it can. Such conditional expressions will be in the next version.

I've written in th past about the difficulties I've encountered when attempting to encode video in any non-standard format using the encoder that came with Adobe After Effects. This is just a quick heads-up to let you know that this seems to be fixed in CS6, where the encoder now is far more cooperative when encoding in odd frame sizes. It still doesn't have all the handles of a dedicated encoding solution, but it at least allows you to encode in the format you need. Case in point, today I encoded a 1312 x 1200 H.264 video without any trouble. That was not possible in CS4. Al least I couldn't figure it out. (I don't know how this was handled in CS5/5.5, since I never used that version.) Mike

MSC is a control protovol, part of the MIDI standard. WATCHOUT can be controlled using this protocol from MIDI devices and programs that support this protocol. See the WATCHOUT manual for details. Mike

Or you could split the side-by-side into two separate files using After Effects or the cropping feature of TMPGEnc. That would allow you to play it using the proxy stereo support built into WATCHOUT. Mike

WATCHOUT can be trigged by MIDI in various ways. I believe Live can send MIDI. Best way to control WATCHOUT may be MSC (MIDI Show Control), but that may not be supported by Live. Mike

So it sounds like the problem was caused by some other software/configuration on your machine, which was resolved by re-installing the OS. ANy idea what that might have been, for the benefit of other users, should they run into this problem? Mike

Should work. I assume you mean AIR for Android, though, since I believe Adobe discontinued Flash for Android some time ago. Mike

It's in the release notes, accessible from the Help menu in the WATCHOUT production software.

The Consolidate command does this, kinda-sorta, but in inverse, in that when you choose the Move mode, it will leave all unused media behind in the old location. After doing a consolidate to separate used and unused media, you can just reverse the locations of the old/new folder and you should have what you asked for.

I assume you've already found the training movies available under http://www.dataton.com/watchout They give an introduction to many production aspects of using WATCHOUT. Mike

WATCHOUT 5.3 is now available in the usual place on our webste. This is a fee update to all current WATCHOUT 5 users. Below is a brief rundown of the changes since 5.2. Enjoy! Mike New Features Compatible with Windows 8. You can now control WATCHOUT display software using the WATCHOUT Remote App running under iOS 6. The global vanishing point set in Preferences can now be overridden in image cues, using the cue's anchor point as a local vanishing point instead. This is useful when you want to make images rotate in exactly the same way along X or Y axis regardless of where they're located on stage. Turkish and Japanese localizations have been added. Bug FixesMasking sometimes worked incorrectly when driving multiple displays from one computer. Thumbnails were sometimes displayed in the wrong position in the Stage window preview. Photoshop files saved in CMYK color space didn't appear. Some MIDI devices could cause a "MIDI Buffer Overflow" error message. The "Datapath Vision RGB PRO" capture card didn't work properly or with poor performance. The "Remote Access" command could fail with an error message under some circumstances.

I took a quick look at your file (5.mov) and can confirm that it doesn't play using the H.264 codec included in WATCHOUT. It's hard to tell exactly why. Just as a test, I re-exported it using QuickTime as a MOV file with H.264 and uncompressed audio, and the resulting file played without problems in WATCHOUT. Without detailed knowledge of the procedure used to produce the file in the first place, it's almost impossible to tell why your file won't play as is. So I suggest you try re-compressing the file from your source content using some appropriate compression tool. Mike

Yes, I would then suspect something else in your computer. Have you tyried WATCHOUT production software on anothe computer, to see if it solves this problem? I have not seen or heard of it except occasionally in the case I mention above. Mike

This sometimes happen if you have multiple instances of the production software open simultaneously. You can copy/paste without opening multiple instances by loading another show between Copy and Paste. Mike