cue server Turn Watchout into a Cue Based Program?

[fraggle]

My question is mroe so related to show control. Often, I have shows taking MIDI from a lighting console. Sometimes, there has been a MIDI failure, and the lighting operator has to manually hit spacebar to get to the next pause cue. In the past, I've used jump cues to move the playhead as soon as possible to the next pause cue, but I was wondering if people have tried other things. Is there a way to use something like tasks to jump to the next cue? 

The only thing I can think of is building every cue into a task and triggering each task in the main timeline? That way, it can work similarly to a program liek Qlab where you can trigger the next cue while the previous cue is still firing?

[Daniel B Chapman]

Fraggle,

I run into this pretty frequently, but assuming show control hasn't failed, MIDI Show Control has been pretty rock solid for me. If you have a cue in the console and it is mapped to the right time line you can move forward and backwards to the correct placement. The only drawback is if the lists are not at 1:1 parity.

Example:

LX	WO
1	1
2
3	3
4
5	5

 

If I  have a list like above where Watchout only has cues 1, 3, 5 and I hit back an MSC Go to 2 doesn't really help me. You could always add some dead content where those control cues exist to make 2 go to the right state, but that's a matter of preference. Fundamentally Watchout is a timeline system and not a cue to cue system so I don't think you're going to see a cue stack anytime soon. After my initial frustration with Watchout, I've found there are a lot of benefits to the Timeline system--namely I can jump back and forth which is rather difficult in big QLab shows unless you program in shortcuts--particularly if you have layers running for long periods like backgrounds. 

If you happen to be running Eos, an easy solution is to put an Eos client into Mirror mode/Client with MSC installed and just use a loopback adapter or rtpMIDI to trigger Watchout. This works in both 6/7 and has been my preference for a while. If you're not above running some code from scratch I have an OSC implementation for Node.js that runs the control protocol from Eos. You'll get errors for missing cues, but that's par for the course. I recently had a USB adapter go bad in the middle of a run and this was flawless for the remainder. It is a pretty simple script. 

https://github.com/danielbchapman/osc-watchout

Long story short, it is a cue like structure, but you need to bend your brain to make it work like QLab. The advantage is that it isn't QLab and you have a single state for each frame. QLab is inherently asynchronous while Watchout is inherently synchronous.

(For whatever it is worth I use Watchout on about half my shows, and QLab on the other half. I've found Watchout to be better in techs where I need to bounce around and QLab better when I'm mixing content live and layering infinitely or using outside programs like Syphon. They're both excellent pieces of software, but if you need a cue list, just hook it up to Eos or a similar offline console on the local link. That's the easiest route and honestly my preference for operators that don't know Watchout or are intimidated by it). If you need help getting that set up, just ask.