Show Cue System

We had something new happen during a show tonight. We have SCS running audio and video cues. The video runs to a projector over an HDMI link. During the intermission, we lost the HDMI for about a second which caused the computer to go back to one screen. SCS then moved the projected image over the SCS window hiding all the controls. After the glitch, the second screen re-initialized in Windows and the desktop graphic appeared on the projector. However, SCS did not restore the projected image to the second screen. The only way to get out of this situation was to Alt-Tab to the desktop and close SCS from the task bar. Restarting SCS put things back to normal.

My question is whether there is a more elegant way to recover from this situation. We were lucky to have it happen during intermission, but if the show was running, it would be nice not to have to restart SCS.

Of course, the best solution would be to avoid drop-outs in the HDMI which we will also be working on!

Hmm. I'll have a look into this. I've just run some tests here using the HDMI external screen attached to my laptop. When I disconnect and then reconnect the HDMI screen, certain events are raised in SCS so hopefully I'll be able to work out what really happened from the detail of those events, and handle the situation gracefully, including displaying a warning message on losing the connection. Note that it's Windows that seems to move the SCS secondary window to the primary display on losing the connection, but it doesn't restore the display when the connection is restored.

I've also experienced this several times using HDMI video. Any loss of EDID or HDCP seems to trigger the screen change. Only way I found to recover is Alt F4 and restart scs.
Windows doesn't seem to handle HDMI transistions very well!

We experimented using a Dr HDMI device http://www.drhdmi.eu/dr-hdmi.html which does work but it's not the ideal solution. Other than resolving in SCS or Windows the only way is to use a pro HDMI mixer such as the Roland V40 HD which is a superb bit of kit. This constantly maintains the handshaking to the PC (even HDCP!) so allows compete control of mixed sources to the projector without causing any hiccup to the pc source.

Nick

A fix is ready for 11.3.4. It's not a 100% guaranteed solution, but it will (a) detect if a screen has been disconnected or connected, and (b) attempt to reposition and resize the video/image targets. The following warning message will be displayed in the status line of the main window: "The number of connected screens has changed. SCS will try to recover but we recommend you close and restart SCS."

With this fix you will now be able to access the 'close window' X marker, etc, as well as the SCS toolbar and/or menu items.

The checks on screens being disconnect or connected is not made if your production does not use any secondary screens (eg if there are no video/image cues).

Thanks Mike. I'll give that a try. We didn't have any problems for the rest of the show, but it's good to have a potential solution.

Nick, thanks for the information on possible hardware fixes.

Cheers,
Jonathan