Show Cue System

Dear Mike and esteemed colleagues...

Thanks so much for your good work, Mike. I want to put in a few words about Video in SCS.

I did four shows in QLab this spring, and it was the first time I'd worked in that environment. The video support was surprisingly robust, to the point that our original plan to run two screens via an automated Arkaos setup was abandoned. One very underpowered Mac was able to run both the sound and video design with no hiccups or streaming problems at all.

These features were handy and extremely usable:

Video fade up/fade down...worked well, and was as smooth as a rendered fade (surprising).
Video could be resized, rotated, moved from one screen to the other (very surprising, but robust and no framerate reduction).

Having audio/video in the same box enabled us to sync fully-assignable audio with ease, and I've seen a steady increase in shows that contain video segments. While I would still use separate video playback machines in many instances, QLab was able to handle two streams of 1024 x 768 video along with audio (and with sizing/screen assignment and fade up/out) with zero issues on the baby Mac.

I think that Mike will be able to at least make SCS as functional and powerful as QLab is and probably considerably more so - and have a potentially larger market simply because of the platform choice. Certainly we continue to see much better acceptance of the Windows platform in themed entertainment venues because there is a much wider variety of industrial computer solutions and the maintenance infrastructure understands and supports it far better. This has been a traditional difficulty we experienced going all the way back to our Amiga and BeBox days...

Video has always been a challenge in the Microsoft environment. The features you mention are available in the core components, but they are not easy to access. However, I'm fully aware of the need to address this and will be spending time on the development of extra video functionality.