matkeane

It sounds like Sedat may have run into a situation where the overall projection area has changed. This happened to me recently when a convention centre decided to replace the video screen between the tech pre-visit and the event without telling anybody. And of course the new one wasn't the same size or even ratio, so my dual displays no longer fit the screen. As it happens, that project was quite simple and so, after changing the softedge, scaling the media by hand was a minor hassle. The project I was working on yesterday had nearly 200 video clips that needed to fill the screen vertically, even if only 950 pixels of the 1080 are actually visible once the scenery was finally installed around the monitors. That's when I decided to use the input for the scaling - there's only so much copy-pasting I can bear to do! I like the idea of using an local output to set the input used for scaling though - I was just doing it by hand in the interface, but JFK's way sounds safer. Can you set inputs in the autostart file, by the way?

I just received some new dongles a couple of weeks ago and, after launching the CodeMeter app, went through the process of registering them online. According to the web site this does, in theory, enable you to deactivate a key if, for example it were lost or stolen. Presumably this only works if the key is used on a machine with internet access though, so it's not necessarily a reliable solution.

If you meant, can you set up all the media clips with different sizes and then change them all to be slightly bigger or smaller without changing each and every scale, then yes, you can do that. First you need to add a Generic Input, and call it something like 'MasterScale'. Then you need to enable 'allow external control of scale, etc' in the options of your media cues. Now set your scale as desired for each clip, and then click on the little Fx icon for the scale tween track and change the values to 'TweenValue * MasterScale'. Now, with the Generic Input set to 1, your cues will all be at the scale you set. If you set the Inout to 0.5 they will all be at 50% of the scale you set on them, for example. Hope that helps.

Hi Adam, For 'almost' duplicating a comp, the Hotkeys script by Walter Sokya is very useful. I say 'almost' since it - like the Watchout interface - defaults to a composition size which matches the size of your combined displays. Having said that, it's still a major time-saver. The ability to duplicate compositions has been mentioned on the feature request thread a few times - you might want to chime in over there if you'd also like to see this built into Watchout one day. See this thread for the download link: http://forum.dataton.com/topic/1069-watchout-production-hotkeys/

@Bluetonesblue - Re: adding arrays of displays. After trying various apps which calculate softedges but leave you to enter the results by hand, I created a little Java app to do make things a little easier: Choose the resolution, number and orientation of the displays, set the softedge, and the application exports a text file with the display data for pasting into Watchout, as well as alignment images. Works with v4 and v5 of Watchout (not sure how v6 will work yet!). Still a few rough edges, but you can download it from my website if you want to have a look: http://matkeane.com/project/watchout-display-builder-app

It would be useful to be able to change the attributes of a group of elements at the same time. For example, selecting several images in the media window and changing the alpha interpretation, or several videos and deactivating frame blending, or several clips on a timeline to change the blending mode. The way things are, I feel like I'm going to wear out my mouse button with all the clicking!

I was thinking the very same thing as Niel Stratton the other day as I scrolled through the hundred or so tasks in my show... Folders, like in the Media window, would be great. The record so far is around 600 tasks, and the tall, narrow task window doesn't make if easy to find them. I've taken to using dummy tasks as labels to group things, but that takes up more space.Alternatively, colour labels or a quick-search tool, similar to the After Effects UI, could be useful, but it seems like folders would be easier to implement.

Hi Mike, That's great, thank you! 60-80Mb/s gave satisfactory results in mpeg2? I've been testing with some downloaded 50Mb/s h264 files which look good; I wasn't sure how much higher the data rate might need to be for comparable quality in mpeg2. Anyway, thanks again for those commands - they will make a good starting point for testing.

Mike, do you happen to remember the ffmpeg settings you used for your 4K Mpeg2 files? I'm looking through the ffmpeg documentation, but if you have a recipe that worked well for you, it would make a good starting point. Thanks!

@Mike: It sounds like morgancreative is looking for the equivalent of the left square bracket shortcut '[' in After Effects, which snaps the in-point of any selected layers to the current time indicator. The ']' key aligns the out-points, alt+[ or alt+] trims the layers. I use these shortcuts a lot when building and retiming animations in AE, and I think having the equivalent in Watchout would be useful. @morgancreative: There is a feature request thread here: http://forum.dataton.com/topic/794-feature-requests-post-here/

Ah, good point, I hadn't thought of looking for the exact frame size - mainly because it hasn't been fixed for the project yet, the client is just talking about "4k" playback. Thanks!

> Yes. If you had searched this forum you would have found examples of that. Just a note to forum moderators: I just tried doing exactly that, but the result is this message: "The following search terms are not allowed and were removed from your query: 4k One or all of your search keywords were below 3 characters" A google search with site:forum.dataton.com is how I found this thread.

Hi Jonas, Quick background: Clients have a bunch of different setups (WO5 on Win 7, WO4 on Win XP, for example) so rather than keep a bunch of PCs around, I run Watchout in a virtual machine while building the show before moving to the production machine. I realize that this may not be a common setup. All the media files are in a 'media' subfolder of the folder where the Watchout project is saved. I often end up building or modifying shows remotely, and by carefully organizing the media it's easy to swap Watchout project files and new media, by FTP or Dropbox, without needing to consolidate. I just tested this again and actually I got things the wrong way round in my last message: Dragging and dropping files from the 'media' folder into the media window results in a relative path (media/images/myimage.jpg) but using the 'add media' menu to import the same files results in an absolute path. So there is a difference in behaviour between importing and dragging-and-dropping, at least in my case. Also if I refresh media, any updated files that were linked using a relative path are relinked with an absolute path. Apologies for dragging Walter's original post a bit off-topic. My background is in video and motion graphics, where we tend to be a bit obsessive about keyboard shortcuts, so maybe user-defined keyboard shortcuts would be a good feature request?

Hi Mike, Yes, dragging folders into Watchout is undoubtedly the fastest but with the drawback, at least when building the show on a virtual PC, that media is linked with an absolute path (z:/network/folder/media/images/etc), while adding media through the menu links it with a relative path (media/images/etc) which makes moving shows easy, and without having to consolidate (which I know is good practice, but would overcomplicate matters when I just need to add a couple of media files to an existing project and send it back to the client).

Thanks for this Walter, and I second your wish to see at least some of these keyboard shortcuts added to the application. The fact that CTRL+I doesn't import media, unlike every other media software package I use, is a constant annoyance!

JFK: I don't mean to hijack this thread, but I have been playing with conditional layers recently. I was wondering if it's possible to use them in the expressions used to trigger auxiliary timelines. I've been using generic inputs as flags to check for active tasks (and prevent other tasks running concurrently) and just wondered whether it was possible to use a conditional layer (on/off) instead of checking for the value of a generic input. It's not mentioned in the expressions section of the manual, but I wasn't sure that was necessarily exhaustive. Thanks.

@Thomas. I agree with your request for an easier way to create/duplicate Aux Timelines. If, when creating a new timeline, the dialogue box at least remembered the settings from the last time, that would already be a step forward. But for your 100 timelines problem, there might be a slightly easier way: If you select your original 'Award winner' timeline in the 'Task' panel and copy, you can paste the clipboard into Notepad. Find the Aux Timeline name and change it. While you're still in Notepad, search for your media filename, and change it from 'winner001.png' to 'winner002.png' (or whatever). Now, select all the text and paste it back into the Task window - and you will have a new, cloned, Aux Timeline linked to a new media file. It's not ideal, but probably still quicker than doing it through the Watchout UI. For 100 entries, it might even be worth writing a script to create the text files for you, assuming the media names conform to a pattern.

In the Display properties, you can disassociate the output resolution and the stage resolution - so you can set a 1920x1080 output to only use 1280x720 pixels on stage, for example. In your case, I think you can calculate the required stage size by multiplying the output resolution by the screen size ratio: 1920 x (32 / 47).

Hi, A recent show involved 3 separate screens, each made up of 2 overlapping HD displays. The project ran with 3 player machines, each using 2 outputs to feed each pair of displays. Some of the media had been pre-split to spread across the 6 displays, and naming the .m2v files 'display 1' through 'display 6' worked fine, as usual. However, some of the media had been created for a single screen (pair of displays), but the client wanted to repeat the clip on the other two screens. Of course, media files named 'display 1' or 'display 2' weren't recognized on displays on the second and third player. So, my question is, is it possible to re-use pre-split files without duplicating and renaming the files? If, for example, Watchout recognized 'Output 1.m2v' and 'Output 2.m2v', the same video proxy could be shown on other displays. In my quick experiments, this didn't seem to be possible though. In a forum post a while ago (http://forum.dataton.com/topic/931-video-freeze-up/?do=findComment&comment=3597) it was suggested that it was still advantageous to use pre-split video files on multi-output players, so I just wondered if it was possible to manage the files by output ID rather than display ID. I guess the recent project may not be a common scenario, but I think it would be useful to be able to reuse media across players without necessarily having to duplicate/rename files. Thanks, Matthew

JFK: Just a follow-up, yesterday I ran the 5.5 installer on a new machine (Win7 64bit) on which Watchout has never been installed. The Wibu key installer did not run automatically.

Mike: So the Wibu installation is still supposed to be automatic? I had a similar experience to the other posters - I uninstalled Watchout and Wibu using the windows 'uninstall programs' tool and restarted, to be on the safe side, then ran the Watchout 5.5 installer but got the error about the dll file. When I looked in the Wibu folder, I saw installers for both 32 and 64 bit (I'm running Win 7 64bit on my test machine) and so I wondered if the Wibu install was manual, seeing as the user has to choose which version to install.

I agree with a lot of what you say - video mapping is an increasingly common request and it's starting to feel like the Watchout deformation tools are lagging behind some of the other mapping tools available, but I'm sure Dataton is aware of this. A quick tip for your point 1 - While I agree it would be nice to be able to do it automatically, I often import a grid image and overlay it in the display while warping. The number of columns/rows depends on the display resolution, but there aren't that many different combinations, and now that I have prepared a folder of grid images, it makes it easier to work out which control point to grab.

Just wanted to second the post here - http://forum.dataton.com/topic/794-feature-requests-post-here/page-3?do=findComment&comment=2549 - about geometry correction. Mapping is an increasingly frequent request from clients and, with the current interface, things aren't very easy. Being able to see the current Stage view in the geometry display would make it a lot easier to see which point needs to be moved. Ideally, it would be possible to create a new control point at an arbitrary position, rather than subdividing a grid which mostly doesn't quite align with the content, but I guess that's a different feature request. In the meantime, something that stops clients looking over my shoulder and saying "Hey, it's much easier in Madmapper, why aren't you using that?" would be nice.

@Jonas, @JFK: I hadn't thought about the decoding being multi-threaded, so I guess I'll keep making pre-split files. Thanks for clearing that up for me.

Apologies for jumping into this thread, but I was wondering whether with WO5 and multiple outputs from the same video card, there is still the same need to split large video files into proxies? I've continued doing this - out of habit as much as anything - but since the files are being read on the same display computer, are stored on the same drive and are being shown by the same graphics card, I wonder whether it's still a necessity unless the files are in a resolution greater than those accepted by the media format.