Mike Fahl

Depends on your use case. If you can get by with the serial output capabilities of WATCHOUT, I'd say that using it this way simplifies things compared to adding an extra piece of software to do this. Otoh, if you need more flexibility than the serial output of WATCHOUT provides, a separate piece of software will be required.

Yes, they can. Mike

An iPad or other external touch screen should work fine. We can provide libraries that make communicating with WATCHOUT easier from a browser (e.g., iPad) or a touch screen computer running either a modern browser or something based on Adobe Flash/AIR. There are examples as well on how to do basic panels witha couple of buttons. For the Flash based solutions, you can download the WATCHOUT Systems Manager from our website. Contact support if you need the JavaScript based library/examples, and they can provide that. Mike

Another case where I've chosen H.264 over MPEG-2 is when applying a green background in the video for using the color keyer in WATCHOUT. This is sometimes a great alternative to using the Animation codec with an alpha channel, assuming the video content doesnt have any pure green (or blue) in it. Here, H.264 seem to produce less blocking artifacts than MPEG-2. Such artifacts (likely stemming from the macroblocks used in MPEG-2) tend to show up along the edges where the keyer kicks in. Mike

If your work doesn't involve very heavy content (lots of hi rez videos playing at the same time), I'd say a laptop should be just fine. Mike

Yes, that sounds likely. The sync beteween the computers use UDP multicast, while most other traffic uses TCP. Seems like your router lets TCP through but not the UDP multicast.

This will be fixed in the upcoming WATCHOUT 5.3 release. Apple made some changes in iOS 6 that we need to account for in WATCHOUT. Hence, you won't need to update the remote app - just WATCHOUT. Mike

This is a known problem in 5.2. It will be fixed in 5.3. In the meantime, you can work around it by not opening WATCHOUT production software by doubleclicking a .watch file. Instead, first open the application, then choose the file from within the application. There's nothing you need to instal in addition to WATCHOUT, which includes its own local copy of VNC. Hope this helps. Mike

You can kinda-sorta do this by shift-clicking the "sunshine" icon on the layer to turn all layers off, then click it again without shift to turn on only this layer. Not quite a solo button but can be useful in a pinch. Mike

No, tweening of position, scaling and rotation only works with individual media files, and comes with additional restrictions and requirements (see the manual for details). Mike

5.3 is currently in limited beta testing. If you're prepared to deal with a beta, plese contact support@dataton.se. Don't know yet if we'll do a full, public beta this time. Probably not. But if you have specific issues that may be addressed in 5.3 it could make sense for you to check out the beta (keeping all the usual beta-caveats in mind). Mike

I believe this is a problem in 5.2, which will be fixed in te upcoming version 5.3. Meanwhile, you can work around it by not starting WATCHOUT by doubleclicking the show file. Instead, first launch WATCHOUT and then open the show form inside the app. Mike

The Animation codec is a much simpler beast. It doesn't have many settings. I believe it's always "all keyframes". The Quaulity setting mainly controls the behavior of subtle color gradients (banding may occur if you reduce the quality setting too much). At max quality setting it's lossless. Due to the way it compresses, it works best for synthetic content with many flat surfaces (i.e., flat text or footage generated from AE or some 3D renderings). It will work for other content as well, but the bitrate will quickly skyrocket for more "natural" or camera-originated content. One key advantage is that it supports a true alpha channel. Using a "matted" (premultiplied by black) setting has a slight performance adnvantage, but you may just as well use "straight" for all practical purposes. Note that using the alpha merely as a keyer for photographic content is inefficient. Instead, you may want to use H.264 and keep the key color background. Then use the WATCHOUT color keyer to key it out at runtime. Another option is to run two video streams in parallell - one with the "mask" and one with the regular content. Then use the "Masked by layer above" feature of WATCHOUT to control the transparency. This allows you to accomplish a fully graded alpha mask even using codecs such as MPEG-2 or H.264.

I believe the kissbox ethernet-to-serial box requires some additional, proprietary prefix to each data packet in order to address the correct port (see section 9.1.4 in their Kiss-Box Editor manual. At least that was the case in the past. For this reason, we have tended to use other ethernet-to-serial solutions that are more transparent "pass-through" devices, not requiring the data to be altered in any way. You may want tot look at the TIBBO and MOXA products. You may also want to check with kissbox to see if they're making any changes in this area. Mike

You need to pay attention to where the vanishing point is. This is set in Preferences, and is indicated by a symbol in the stage window while the Preferences dialog is up. Put the vanishing point at the center of your animation, and it should help. Note that the vanishing point currently is a show-wide setting, so it can only be set at a single position on stage. This works fine in many cases. But occasionally you'll need more control over where exactly the vanishing point is. E.g., in order to make the same kind of "rotating object" on multiple screen areas. This is currently not possible to accomplish since there's only a single, global vanishing point, which all rotated objects will point towards. The next version of WATCHOUT will allow you to create "local" vanishing points, providing more fine-grained control over the perspective. Hope this helps. Mike

Doing the "tweening" from the outside is going to be slow and choppy no matter what. Let WATCHOUT do the tweening instead. Simply supply a second parameter ot setInput, which controls the transition rate (in milliseconds if memory serves me - please check the manual for details). Mike

I've used the built in screen sharing from MacOS X to pipe its screen image into a WATCHOUT Remote Computer media item. You need to set up for VNC access, with a VNC password (I believe this is an additional setting in the screen sharing control panel). Also, there's a bug in Apple's VNC implementation that stops it from working unless you capture the entire desktop of the Mac. I.e, you can't capture just a portion of the display, or the main display only (if there are multiple displays connected). Mike

To where are you sending this string? What IP address and port number? What's listening on that address/port? Try communicating with it using a TELNET client first, to make sure everything works OK in the receiving end. Mike

That was done using a cusom iPad app and server side code. But we have an example on how to do something similar as part of the WATCHOUT Academy curriculum. Please contact support@dataton.se if you need further assistance. Mike

If you have this problem with a particular video file, I suggest you send a small sample of such a file to support@dataton.se for investigation. My guess is that you have some sort of codec conflict. Do you know what's in the file (container format and codecs used)? Mike

As far as I know, Microsoft's Remote Desktop protocol is proprietary. But perhaps you have more up-to-date information here? If so, please let me know where to find those details. Mike

Scroll wheel together with the Ctrl key will do that in a timeline window. Add Shift to scrub faster. Ctrl-arrowkeys will do that with an image cue selected on a timeline. Add Shift to move in 10 pixel steps.

Nope. Still same error message: Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: impl/Starter : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0 Mike

You may want to recompile the app targeting JRE 1.6, since many Macs don't support 1.7 (which I believe is what you're targeting). I curently get the following error on my Mac: Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: impl/Starter : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0 Mike

The above message indicates that WATCHOUT display software stopped working or become inaccessible from the production computer. When you get this message, does the display software seem to continue running? I.e., does it remain on screen displaying an image? Can you bring it to Window mode by pressing Ctrl-W? If not, it may indicate it has locked up for some reason. If the program remains on screen and remains responsive, the error most likely indicate a network communication problem. Mike