control preferences? Change Preferences through Task?

[fraggle]

Does anybody know of an easy way to change watchout preferences through let's say tasks? This could be helpful in that I could make a task to enable/diable MIDI quickly. Or in another specific case, changing the display cluster name when I want to switch to my backup system in the middle of a show?

[Mickey]

I'm not sure how to solve your exact two cases, but it may be found in sending TCP/IP commands to yourself.

The way I typically go about some of this is by sending output command cues to my own machine via tasks. If you open up your output window and send a TCP network command to your local IP with port 3040, you can drag the output cue to your timeline and send something like "enableLayerCond""1"$0D (there may be more elegant syntax but that's how I'm aware of doing it) to enable condition 1.

I believe any command (user guide pg. 178) you can send to WATCHOUT via a network command can be sent internally, enabling layer conditions, setting input values, enabling timecode, etc. It may not be elegant, but you could in theory load shows with certain preferences enabled. Though, you may find a better way of going about it with TCP/IP commands.

[jfk]

21 hours ago, fraggle said:

Does anybody know of an easy way to change watchout preferences through let's say tasks? This could be helpful in that I could make a task to enable/diable MIDI quickly. Or in another specific case, changing the display cluster name when I want to switch to my backup system in the middle of a show?

 

3 minutes ago, Mickey said:

I'm not sure how to solve your exact two cases, but it may be found in sending TCP/IP commands to yourself.

The way I typically go about some of this is by sending output command cues to my own machine via tasks. If you open up your output window and send a TCP network command to your local IP with port 3040, you can drag the output cue to your timeline and send something like "enableLayerCond""1"$0D (there may be more elegant syntax but that's how I'm aware of doing it) to enable condition 1.

I believe any command (user guide pg. 178) you can send to WATCHOUT via a network command can be sent internally, enabling layer conditions, setting input values, enabling timecode, etc. It may not be elegant, but you could in theory load shows with certain preferences enabled. Though, you may find a better way of going about it with TCP/IP commands.

While sending IP commands to itself solves some needs, in the two cases above, no IP commands exist. Unfortunately MIDI disable does not exist, MIDI input is always active. Connect / disconnect MIDI via external means.

[RBeddig]

On 11/9/2023 at 1:24 AM, fraggle said:

changing the display cluster name when I want to switch to my backup system in the middle of a show?

There is no command to change display cluster names or such things in the protocol and there are quite a few reasons for that.

A way to solve your issues would be to take a closer look at conditional layers and maybe at virtual displays and tiers.

Conditional layers can be used to turn layers on or off on-the-fly. You can send those commands from inside WATCHOUT as described by Mickey but a better way would probably be to get yourself a small Elgato Stream Deck or some easy to program control software to send those commands from the outside.

In your backup scenario you could route your content through virtual displays before it reaches the "real" display and you could of course route the backup servers to the displays in the same way. As you don't want to show both instances at the same time on the outputs, you'd use conditional layers to make those virtual screens visible which you want to see on the projectors.

BTW, there is a video on the Dataton website about backup strategies and this also explains an installation where this approach was used in a fully automated way.

https://www.dataton.com/techtalk-video-building-fully-automated-redundancy-for-watchout-in-advanced-fixed-installations

Hope it helps!