Show Cue System

My Tech director and I just bought SCS Pro, and I love it. I took me 3 hours from zero to having all the cues (30 or so) input and setup for out production of Arcadia. The ability to automate cross fades and which speaker each cue plays is really nice.

I have been having a stability problem that seems to occur while I am editing cues. After editing the cue list and saving it other cues in the list get corrupted and will generate an error message when the cue is run. This error results in SCS crashing. This happens randomly and there doesn’t seem to be a pattern at all to the corruption. Deleting the offending cue(s) and recreating it solves the problem, sometimes its 2-3 cues and they are usually all in the same order. I don’t have the text of the error (I know not too helpful!) but it is long and seems to represent the database entry for that particular cue. (It has a string of what seems to cue parameters.) I will try to do a screen cap the next time it blows up.

Once I fix the offending cues, the program is quite stable, so the only real inconvenience is that I have to go through the entire cue list prior to a performance or rehearsal if I have made any changes. This is a little tiresome since the dynamic nature of the program and the ability to edit on the fly is really one of the more powerful aspects of the system.

Some details on my setup....

Computer is a tower PC running a Pentium 4 3.0Ghz processor and 1GB of ram. This machine is dedicated to running sound Cues and interfacing with my Mackie TT24 (The most badass digital console for under US $10K)

I am running SCS 9.1.5a (only version ever installed)

Any insight?

A screenshot of the error would be helpful if you could email that to me. When you get cues out of order is this after you have moved cues around in the 'tree view' of the cue list in the Editor?

the only real inconvenience is that I have to go through the entire cue list prior to a performance or rehearsal if I have made any changes

Why do you have to do that? Is everything OK if you just close and restart SCS?

Mike Daniell wrote:A screenshot of the error would be helpful if you could email that to me. When you get cues out of order is this after you have moved cues around in the 'tree view' of the cue list in the Editor?

the only real inconvenience is that I have to go through the entire cue list prior to a performance or rehearsal if I have made any changes

Why do you have to do that? Is everything OK if you just close and restart SCS?

The cues are not out of order, If I make changes to the Cue file, sometimes I will get an error on playback of a different cue. I have not isolated the problem yet and sice the show is in production I don't want to mess with the cue file. The program will error on the cue every time and the after you click "ok" on the error the program quits. Once the corruption has happend, the file will bomb out on that cue every time untill the cue is deleted and then recreated.

So this means that I have to test the file by playing through the entire cue stack to make sure there are no cues that will break. As long as I dont make changes, there is no need to test the file, in other words the only way I will trust a cue file is after I have run through it once, before the production.

At any rate, once this production is over I will try to recreate the problem and send you screen shots and a copy of the corrupted scs file.

Thanks,
Matt