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Either method (Remote or Off-line -> Load -> Online?) should work about the same. I would recommend using Standby for the process either way. In both shows, create standby layer(s) that are the same the entire duration of each show. Either from IP control (remote, watchnet, other control systems) or watchmaker ... Enter standby, load other show, (set time position if anything other than 0 is desired, set and pause any aux timelines needed), exit standby. Also note, if the show that is loaded is the same name as the current loaded show, the timeline time positon will not reset to 0, auxiliary timelines will not reset, all will remain where they are. Loading a show with a different name will set the time position to 0, all aux timelines stopped at 0. "load other show" is a single load command from IP (as cluster mode is always "online"). With watchmaker "load other show" means go offline, open new show, go online.

Another approach would be to use different show files for the two different geometry needs. Simply load the correct show for the geometry setup desired. If you plan a transition still image in both shows, you can even load the new show without any image change (granted the geometry will change).

... and to be clear, the upgrade to any WATCHOUT 5 key to add version 6 is handled electronically. The process involves an exchange of encrypted text data via email. To start the upgrade process, using the License Manager in watchmaker (v5.5+), you extract data from your keys, email it to your vendor / partner, and after payment is arranged, a response email will contain text data you copy and paste into License Manager to apply the upgrade of your existing v5 keys. The v5 key never leaves your possession. The upgraded key retains v5 function, and adds v6 function. BTW All v5 keys purchased this year should already contain both v5 and v6. You can also check the versions your keys support with the License Manager in watchmaker

wow, private beta questions in the public forum? makes it hard to tell people they can not have it yet, don't you think? anyway, thank you Mike for that information, that is very helpful.

I did take a look at the documentation for the console - Pearl 2008/2010/Tiger Manual. As you might have surmised from posts above, it is a console not well suited for control interface. It does not support MIDI Show Control. It has a proprietary MIDI command set based on the basic MIDI commands (Note, Program Change, etc.) which is really intended for communication between various Avolite option devices. It also supports MIDI Time Code chase (but not SMPTE, go figure). I do not see any support for Avolite console accepting DMX input, although I could easily be missing something. As noted above, depends on how you are using it. If the show is a straight run beginning to end, a SMPTE time code - MIDI Time Code converter setup to lock the two would make some sense. Watchout cluster as master, a SMPE Time Code audio .wav file played from WATCHOUT, fed to a SMPTE - MTC converter, to the chasing Avolite console. For a cued show, nothing so elegant. Receiving MIDI Notes from the console to blind trigger watchout tasks is possible, but not a reliable way to do it like MIDI Show Control provides. Need a MIDI interface for your WATCHOUT computer for that approach. BTW When I specify a WATCHOUT system that will receive MIDI input, I suggest the following: two (2) MIDI input interface ≈ $70 each one (1) MIDI Solutions Thru ≈ $120 each three (3) MIDI cables (M-M) ≈ $20 each This way you can feed the MIDI input signal to both watchmaker and watchpoint cluster master. WATCHOUT will only use one or the other, never both, but setting it up this way makes transitions from Production control to cluster control painless - no re-patching. Not to mention having redundant MIDI interfaces provides a bit of backup when Murphy visits. Or you could go through the laborious process of triggering tasks from console DMX channel level changes sent to WATCHOUT DMX input. You will need a DMX - ArtNet convertor for that approach. As Thomas points out, a custom "interpreter" in between the two can provide more valid function. At the end of the day, if you were considering purchase of a new console for an integrated show system, this is not a console you would choose.

Live shows or canned playback? Not sure what AVOLITES is - the Avolite web site seems indicate the products include lighting consoles, dimmer racks, network devices, and media servers. If you wish to trigger stored events in a lighting console, the console model will determine if and how that is best impemented. Can you be more specific on the device you are attempting to interface?

The advantage is Win 7 HP has everything that is needed by WATCHOUT. Ultimate has everything, and more, so you must take extra care to disable as much of the "more" as possible. i.e. the extra money spent on Ultimate gets you nothing, and adds to the chance of getting it wrong. That said, we use Win 7 Professional, and its only advantage is it lets you change the Windows serial number after cloning, where I do not think Home Premium allows that.

Well that is a misleading statement. WATCHOUT supports as many devices as MIDI permits, which is quite a few. So far I have not encountered any situation where that is insufficient. There is an install of 36 WATCHPAX in use here that supports over 160 MIDI connected pushbuttons. Been running for over a year now quite trouble free. Now WATCHOUT uses Windows MIDI services and that is limited to one MIDI connection, but that in no way restricts the number of MIDI devices. I just have not encountered any situation yet where the MIDI input support of WATCHOUT is insufficient. As for multiple USB connections for multiple MIDI adaptors, that is not the correct way to implement a MIDI buss.

Beware, you did not ask a specific enough question to get a totally accurate answer. Most professional audio interfaces will provide stereo output with WATCHOUT. Very few of those will provide more than two channels, however, as WATCHOUT uses a multi-channel only model in WDM. BTW v6 will change this, and will use multiple stereo pairs for multi-channel output in lieu of the multichannel model currently used, a fundamental change in the way WATCHOUT handles audio. That change should make it compatible with a wider variety of professional interfaces. For example, i know the MOTU interfaces are stereo only with Windows 7 and v5 and older, but the same interfaces will provide eight channels (four stereo pairs) with v6.

When discussing display cable lengths, resolution and refresh rate (total bandwidth) are significant as well. i.e What may work at 100' for 1400x1050@60p Hz may not work the same for 1920x1080@60p This is especially true for long copper runs.

matkeane and Alex, Well the AMD FirePro software EDID manager experience you describe is not experienced by all using that tool. There very well may be something you are doing differently than others, and it would be valuable to identify what that is.

Have you tested that? Just today I had a technician tell me that was not entirely true in practice.

Yes to all three questions

Delay is the most common "gotcha" that we hear about. With version 5, most capture cards will exhibit slightly less than a two frame delay with progressive digital inputs. (And DataPath capture cards should show an improvement in this area when v6 becomes available.)

Might start here: Mechanics of WATCHOUT

There is a EXPRESSION section in the User Guide, page 212 - Chapter 12 - Tasks and Expressions. There is a List of Operators table on page 215. There is an update to expressions in Dataton WATCHOUT™ version 5.5.x Release Notes Conditional expressions are now supported in trigger conditions and tween expressions. This allows you to select one of two possible values depending on a condition. The expression a ? b : c yields b if a is true, otherwise it yields c. This can be used to limit the range of a calculation. For example, assume you have an input that goes from 0 to 100, but you want to constrain it to 0…50 in a tween expression, use the formula in -------------- The MasterScale value used above is first defined in the Input Window as a generic input. BTW The setInput command is usable with all input types - DMX (ArtNet), MIDI or generic. You can use it in autostart.txt to define startup / default values for DMX or MIDI inputs. WATCHOUT will execute the most recent change received from either live or external command. So the startup setInput value will be overridden as soon as the live signal comes online. While running, when setInput is sent to an input in a cluster with live MIDI and/or live DMX, the last received change is executed, regardless of source - live or IP command.

This is a general AV connection, nothing unique to WATCHOUT. Extenders must be up to the task, determined by your distance, output resolution & refresh rate, computer output connector and display input connector. It can be important to find extenders that are self powered and reliably pass the EDID signal from the display. Extenders with integrated EDID management are even better. Either HDMI or DVI should be possible. DVI is preferable for its locking connections. I believe if you search this forum you will find a few conversations on the topic. Entered into the Forum search bar ' display signal extender ' returned 3 results ' hdmi extender ' returned 11 results

Yes you can. As I mentioned earlier, you might want to range the scale factor. Instead of 'TweenValue * MasterScale' you can range the scale, so that the static scaling factor covers both up and down scaling. To achieve an adjustment range of 0 to 4x, TweenValue * (MasterScale*4) would provide a range from 0 to 4x and the static input MasterScale value .25 would equal no scaling. So with the modified formula, the command to add to your autostart.txt file would be: setInput "MasterScale" 0.25 (If this is the last command line in your file, be sure to leave a blank line after it, or it will not execute.) If you do not want to change existing tween formulas, for your example formula, to achieve no scale, you would send. setInput "MasterScale" 1 There are considerations, restrictions that go with using live tweens in this way. When the pixels move (and they do with scaling), you must set the media's properties in the media window listing to allow More Effects and Capabilities This will restrict maximum media size to 4K x 4K in WO5 (8K x 8K in WO6). This setting causes WATCHOUT to always load the entire image, even when only part of it is visible. The normal way is to load only the visible area. I guess with modern computers, you will not likely see much of an issue.

Nice rig Claude. I am not going to try and answer your MPEG questions, but one of your comments surprised me. Live input affects your movie decoding capacity? Is the live input interlaced or progressive? I ask, because as I understand it, assuming the Live Video media object is correctly set for the input signal type, interlaced live video will de-interlace in the cpu, which I would expect would take some resources away from movie decoding. Progressive, on the hand, should bypass the CPU and DMA direct to the GPU, which should have no impact on movie decoding. When selecting your live video rig, this may be worth consideration.

I still do not understand, sorry. WATCHOUT is agnostic about the final screen size, it functions with pixels. It is still the same number of pixels, the size of the pixels will change, but the pixel count is a constant. Therefore, changing the screen size does not require a change in the content scaling. Changing the screen size changes the magnification - changes the resulting image size, but that is what you would expect. So I still do not understand what you are trying to accomplish.

Changing the screen size does not need to change the scale if you maintain aspect ratio. Changing the screen aspect ratio would only need to change scale if you choose to distort every video in the show to change their aspect ratio accordingly. And the input / live tween trick should address that for you I guess. If it were me, I would maintain apsect ratio by redcuing both height and width proportionately (undershooting one dimension if necessary). But I am from a generation that views any asymmetrical scaling as a mistake. Prior to the digital world we would never allow this, and over the many years I have become acutely sensitive to this. And I guess am in the minority in that respect. (Hotel televisions set to asymmetrically scale to fill the screen drive me nuts, I change the settings to maintain the aspect ratio when I can. Some hotel TVs do not allow aspect ratio changes, and that forced "hillbilly high def" drives me nuts.) ymmv

You do not do it with USB, you do it with MIDI. No, there is no support for multiple MIDI - USB converters. That is not the way MIDI is intended to work. MIDI is a buss, and you can daisy chain quite a few MIDI devices on a single MIDI buss. Do not try and re-invent the wheel with USB. i.e. There is an installation in the US with 38 WATCHPAX in a single cluster, and there is one MIDI input to the cluster master. On that one MIDI input are fourteen MIDI Solutions F8 interfaces, providing 112 independent switch driven triggers.

That would certainly work. You might want to range and offset the scaling a bit, so you can go from say 70% to 200% or some such, depending on the actual needs. An external control device to change the input value is not a requirement, there is a trick that allows you to set the Master Scale input value with a single cue at the start of the show,

The display of the IP address in watchpoint's logo screen is completely unrelated to the display connection. The issue is with either the network connection or the setup of the NIC. Troubleshoot your network, not your dislays.

Not clear what you are trying to accomplish here, but I believe you can accomplish what you are after by deselecting “Width and Height same as Display Resolution” You can then scale the content on the stage up or down as needed for the projector.