Show Cue System

Hi,

I've used SCS a few times now and it's worked flawlessly every time.

We've just finished this years show and are now at the very beginning stages of next years. One thing I do know is that there is one special effect with sound which will take a bit of doing...:

Basically, I need to have a helicopter fly over the audience from the back of the auditorium to the stage. At the moment I would have to have two people sat at the mixer and amps fading and panning between channels and outputs to get the effect. Then I wondered - does SCS do this?

We have four speaker pairs - back, middle, front and foldback. Currently the foldback is on an Aux output. The front is on R, and the front/back is on L to an amp with 2 channel/4 speakers configured to send 1 channel to all 4 speakers - I can adjust the volume of each pair of speakers on the amp.

I was thinking if I got an extra sound card (or more?) and put the output from each card into a seperate channel on the mixer, I could get SCS to pan/fade/whatever between the sound cards? Then I just need to set the different mixer inputs to fully panned to a given speaker pair.

Can someone comment on whether I'm talking absolute rubbish, or if there's a better way, or if I'm on the right track, or...?

Thanks,

Peter

Hi howartp,

Yes - this is the sort of thing that is much easier to do with SCS than a bunch of people spread out around the venue.

What you would need is a couple of stereo sound cards. Often people use an external USB sound card as their primary interface (they are usually better quality and have less interference noise from the computer's internal workings), and have the computer's internal sound card available to them as well for less critical applications. Putting two internal soundcards in a desktop PC can be done as well, though sometimes you need to do a bit of manual setting up of drivers.

What you would do [assuming you are using a later version of SCS v.8 ] is to have two consecutive cues playing the same helicopter audio file. SCS can do this fine. If you set the second cue to 'Auto Start 0 seconds After Start' of the first cue, these two cues will 'Link', meaning that what ever you do to the first one on the transport controls will happen to the second. You can manually fire the pair of fades as the action dictates, or auto-start at some pre-determined time after the cue that started playback.

You connect one or both outputs of the first card to a Console Channel routed to the Front Speakers, and one or both outputs of the second card to a Console Channel routed to the Rear Speakers.

So, you set the first cue to play out of the output routed to the rears, and start it's level up. You set the second cue to drive the Front speakers, and start with it's level down.

You can then do the crossfade by creating two Fade cues, one acting on cue 1 - fading it down, and one acting on cue 2 - fading it up. Set the second one to auto-start after the first, and experiment with the number of seconds between them, and with the length and type of fade used in each, to get a smooth fade.

If all this is too hard, the simple way is to have two separate cues, routed to the two cards, one with a fade-out set, and the other with a fade-in set. The second one would also have a Stop cue that stops the first one. You play the first one, then when you want the pan to happen, fire the second one. It will stop the first one (ie- start it's fade-out), and start fading in the second one. Instant cross-fade (but not as flexible as the other way).

Cheers,
Nick

Hi Nick,

Thanks for the reply.

As it happens, my friend pointed out to me earlier that most current motherboards support 5.1 by giving an option to use the In/Out/Mic ports as three seperate outputs. I'd already checked my machines to see if any had the 6 outputs, but none had - I'd forgotten about the optional switching.

Therefore, I downloaded 8.4.3 onto my Media PC which has the full whack of capabilities (apart from 6 ports!) and hooked up three sets of pc speakers and played about with the piece of music which comes in the Demo.

It seemed to work fine, so I just need to try it out on the Church PC (which becomes a theatre for two months in January/February) and hook it up to the mixer/amps.

I'll come back if I have any further questions.

Thanks again,

Peter.