Mike Fahl

Use the "wait" command in your CMD.txt script file. See page 266 in the manual. Mike

Blue screens and kernel failures are the results of hardware errors or possibly buggy drivers. It can never be caused by application errors. I suggest you move your WATCHOUT software to a known good hardware, to verify proper operation. Then bring the results back to your computer vendor to determine why their computers misbehave. Mike

There are two separate programs involved when running WATCHOUT display software. The one named WATCHPOINT.EXE and the one named WP.EXE. They may appear in the task manager under their window names, although I think you can also view the processe's EXE filename. The purpose of this two-tiered approach is to increase reliability, where one of the two processes mainly watches the other, to make sure it keeps running properly. Should it for some reason stop doing so, it will be automatically re-started to get it back to working order as soon as possible without manual intervention. If you feel that WATCHOUT display software isn't working properly, please contact support@dataton.se with a test case that exhibits the problematic behavior, and they'll help you sort it out. Mike

More details on this subject can be found here: http://dataton.com/forum/topic/114-watchout-5-and-successful-surroundmultichannel-audio-setup/page__st__20

I believe there behavior of multi-channel audio has changed for the MOTU under Win7 compared to XP. It worked fine in XP, but this unit seems to no longer work fur multi-channel under Win7. There are some other multi channel audio playback devices that work fine under Win7. Perhaps JME can chime in here, as he made some specific tests a while ago for multi channel audio.

Since this show was made on 5.2, you need to update to 5.2 in order to open it. This is a free upgrade for any v5 user. You can always open an older show version with a newer version of the program, but generally not vice versa.

Is this WATCHOUT display under control of some external control system, or is it stand-alone? How is the show started? E.g., by a local script file? It sounds like your PC isn't fully initialized by the time WATCHOUT and/or the show is loaded. You may be able to work around this by either delaying the start of WATCHOUT, or the loading/start of the show. Hence my questions above.

Tthere's also a javascript version of the Flash WATCHOUT Systems Manager API. This API allows front ends to be created using HTML/CSS/javascript (aka "HTML5") technologies, as available in iPad/iPhone and many other modern browsers.

When using multiple display computers and overlapping displays (i.e., edge-blended projectors), always use a Video Proxy set to Pre Split to manage video playback. Merely placing the videos as multiple cues on a timeline may result in display glitches, and will reduce playback performance.

We have been able to reproduce this problem, and a fix will be included in the next version. No ETA at this point, I'm afraid.

FYI, the behavior of the String output cue was changed in version 5.2 to the one you're expecting. I.e., it now takes the layer condition into account.

WATCHOUT will attempt to set the resolution and refresh rate you've set per display and in Preferences. However, it's at the mercy of the OS and display drivers to allow it to do so. Hence, the safest and most predictable is usually to set the desired resolution and refresh rate manually before starting WATCHOUT.

If you're running VGA, you may also be able to avoid EDID issues by cutting the signal wire that transports this data in he VGA connector. This procedure is described on page 204 in the WATCHOUT 4 User's Guide (this info was removed in the WATCHOUT 5 user's guide). Also, when a display computer exhibits this problem, is it always the same display, or do you get this problem on any display in your setup? Are you using one display per computer, or do you run multipled displays from some PCs?

Apart from the multiple outputs from one PC, other features should work just fine under XP.

As long as you stay withing standard video resolutions and aspect ratios, Adobe Media Encoder should be fine. I've never had much success with it trying to make non-standard frame sizes, though. May very well be me not being able to figure it out. So if anyone has had success with doing non-standard frame formats with Adobe Media Encoder, please enlighten us here.

That shouldn't be the case. If you believe you see this behavior, please contact support@dataton.se with a small test show, to see if they can reproduce the problem.

It sounds like a strange protocol implementation that only allows for a single command after opening the connection. Are you sure that's the expected behavior of the protocol? Perhaps you're not terminating/framing the command properly? To answer your direct question; no there's no way to expicitly force the connection to close immediately after each command. You may want to look into whether the projector also accepts commands over UDP, in which case that may be an alternative. An UDP port doesn't use a "connection" in ther same sense, so there's no connection to close in this case.

No. It can only control the display software.

The basics are all in the User's Guide that comes with the software (appendix D and E). Protocol works the same whether you connect by serial or IP.

WATCHOUT display software tracks shows by name. Each show is self contained, and manages its own set of media files. Hence, saving a show under a different name means it's a new show, with its own set of media. As I understand your question, you'd like to have four versions of a show that share the same set of media. There's no concept of "sharing media" between shows in WATCHOUT display software, so this isn't really possible. You may play tricks with renaming the copies to the same show file name, reload the show and go online. As long as the complete set of media is identical, you may get away with this. But as soon as you add/remove media to one of the "versions", WATCHOUT will get confused since the same show (i.e., a show with a particular name) isn't really the same show (since the set of media files is different). Not sure whether this helps or just adds to the confusion. But, long story short, you can't share media across shows in the display software. Your best bet to manage multiple versions therefore is to do so use auxiliary timelines. You can have four timelines in the same show (e.g. named Version 1 ... Version 4). This allows you to easily try different looks. Here, there's no problem sharting the same set of media, since its all within the same show. For minor alternative versions, you may also look into the Conditional Layers feature, which allows you to keep, e.g., multiple language versions in the same show file.

Can you mark each cue point along the timeline with a "Pause" Control Cue with a specific name? If so, it should be fairly easy to create something that will allow you to go to the next/previous control cue using the "gotoControlCue" command (see the User's Guide for details). Contact me off forum if you need help finding someone to develop a custom app for you.

See the GetControlCuesInfo method in the WATCHOUT Systems Manager API documentation, which can retrieve a list of control cues. This documentation (in HTML form) is included in the WATCHOUT Systenms Manager download. There are a couple of example apps as well, that shows how this works.

Yes, they match if you run a timecode that runs at "wall clock speed", such as 25 fps (PAL), or true 30 fps. The drop-frame NTSC variant also matches "wall clock speed" on average, while non-dropframe will diverge. So if you want the two to match in terms if the second count, pick a timecode format that runs at 25 or 30 fps exactly, and they will.

The port number used by WATCHOUT display software is fixed at 3039. Why would you need to change it?

You need to do this as a vertical pre-split (i.e., one video per display, played using a Video Proxy set to "Pre-split"). See the WATCHOUT User's Guide for details. The preferred video encoding format is MPEG2 or H.264.