Mike Fahl
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Posts posted by Mike Fahl
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I'd tend to agree with Walter/Hugo here. However, I know there are several users also in the "other camp". We had another forum user complain this past week about the fact that the forum is moderated. He really wanted all his postings to show up immediately, since he wanted the ability to get immediate help from other users.
While I understand the urgency we all sometimes find ourselves in, I do believe for this forum to remain a useful and intersting place to go to on a regular basis, we have to keep the "signal to noise ratio" as high as possible. The only way I can think of for accomplishing that is moderation. Without moderation, it would quickly turn into a "I need HELP NOW!!!" forum. I know, because we've had such forums in the past, and it was a constant struggle to keep the noise out. While this may feel better to newbies posting for help, it would likely also scare away many professional users, which would negate the purpose.
So we intend to keep moderating this forum, specifically for that reason, while at the same time doing our best to answer support@dataton.se as fast as we can to help our users with urgent needs. You help us chose wisely here though conversations such as this one. So, please, if you have feeling in relation to how we handle this, please let us know your thoughts by a follow-up postign on this thread.
Mike
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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What I want to do is say zoom in on a picture but at the same time keep the scale the same.
I have a hard time undertanding what you want to accomplish. Perhaps you'd get better answers if you describe your problem more clearly.
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To the original poster; Note that you must enable external control on the Control page in Preferences for this to work.
Mike
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nikolai and kilic, many thanks for all your excellent suggestions! Just few breif comments.
This can be achieved in a way by "Condition" maybe, not checked if condiiton setting of a layer also disable control cues or not.
Yes, it can.
Not only with math op. but also logical expressions;
If faderA > 0.5 then TweenValue + faderB*100 else TweenValue + faderB*200 (Just an example)
With logical expressions we can achieve too much variations with limited Inputs.
Such conditional expressions will be in the next version.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Now the problem is fixed!
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
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Should work. I assume you mean AIR for Android, though, since I believe Adobe discontinued Flash for Android some time ago.
Mike
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It's in the release notes, accessible from the Help menu in the WATCHOUT production software.
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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.1) a "reverse" consolidate function. Currently the consolidate function copies all media in use into another folder. I would like to *move* all *unused* files to another folder, leaving the existing show in place.
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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
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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.
- Masking 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.
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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
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Is there a possibility of multi-tracking and outputting within the Watchout
in WATCHOUT FORUM
Posted
The options you see are the various possible channel names supported by the WAV file format.
No. Those 18 possible assignments will always be there. They're part of the WAV standard. However, when you drag a WAV file into the tool, it will only list the number of channels available in the file. Each of those channels can then be asigned to any of the 18 possible names.
Yes and no. Each channel in the file can only be assigned to a single output name.
That button removes any name assignments youve applied, returning the file to its initial (default) sequential assignent, where each channel is assigned in order to each possible output name.
For a mono file, there's only a single channel you can assign to an output. For a stereo file, there are two. Either channel can be assigned to any output name (although those need to be assigned in ascentind order, due to limitations in the WAV file format).
Hope this helps.
Mike