Midi Show Control Help

[wombat]

I do a lot of work in my high school's theatre and I have basically been experimenting with some stuff, I have been doing sound and lights for over 5 years now so I'm not really new to much of this but I have never in my life touched Midi Show Control, we have a dance concert coming up and I want to be able to get our lightboard to run off midi cues from SCS so that it is more or less perfectly synced up. I recently upgraded my license to professional so I could get the Midi functionality and I purchased a USB to midi cable, our lightboard supports MSC but I cannot get SCS to control the lightboard. If anyone could provide a brief explanation about MSC in conjunction with SCS for me that would be much appreciated, I have searched all over the internet and can't find a good tutorial so at this point I'm just trying random things.

[Mike Daniell]

What make and model of lighting board do you have?

It may also be worth considering controlling SCS from the lighting board instead of vice versa. Not for any technical reason, but just that in many shows there are far more lighting cues than sound cues.

[wombat]

We have a lehigh rendition board, I've also tried getting SCS to act upon the signals of the board, either one will work in my situation, again, any help is appreciated. Thanks for the response!

[Mike Daniell]

Regarding controlling the lighting board from SCS using MSC, there is one field I can't find any info about in the Rendition User Manual. This is an image extracted from the manual:


I suggest you select Enable MSC In and deselect the other check boxes (unless you need them for other purposes). Select a Receiver ID in the range 1-126, eg 2.


In SCS you will need to select a MIDI Out Port under View / Options / MIDI Devices and Control. You do not need to select any other settings under this tab.

In a MIDI Send Cue to activate a particular lighting cue, set up the cue something like this:



The Device Id must match the Rendition Receiver ID.
What I cannot find out from the Rendition manual is what should be entered against Command Format. This is an essential byte in the MIDI command, but I cannot find any info about it or any examples of expected MIDI messages. I suggest you try 01H Lighting.
The Command should be Go or one of the other commands listed in the Rendition manual (Go, Stop, Resume or Fire), depending on what the requirements are for this particular SCS MIDI Send cue.
Enter your lighting board cue number against Q Number, eg 21 in this example. Leave Q List and Q Path blank.

I don't have access to a Rendition board so cannot check the above, but it looks like it should work OK.

[wombat]

Thanks for the help! I really appreciate it, I never get this much help from software companies that have hundreds of support technicians, I will try this out on Monday when I'm back with the board and let you know how it went. Thanks again!

[wombat]

Thanks again for your help!

I emailed lehigh because I tried and tried and couldn't get it to work, they responded with:

"Jack,
The Rendition console midi is still under construction. Please check our web site for up date.
Thank You,"

So apparently you can't even make it work if you try, so hopefully this will be fixed soon, thanks again for your help.

-jack

[Nick]

Hi wombat,

yeah - if only all other companies were as responsive as Mike Daniell!

I don't know your lighting board, but does it have any way of connecting an external GO button? If so, a quick-and-nasty workaround would be to send normal MIDI note messages out of SCS to a Midisolutions Relay box, and wire the contact closure output of this to the LX board, allowing SCS to effectively push the LX board's GO (or NEXT) button. As long as both SCS and the LX board were in the right cues at the start of each sequence, this should work fine. Also, many of the smaller boards have an audio input for following the bass beat of music. You could connect this to a spare soundcard output and play a SCS audio track with a kick drum sample to the LX board as required....depends on what the board can do with it.

Cheers,
nick