Show Cue System

Per subject line - brand new production, no cues, add video/image cue, select the .mp4 file (which plays fine on VLC) and SCS disappears. Re-starting SCS and attempting to recover crashes windows.

Unfortunately that's probably an issue in xVideo - the video playback library used by SCS. If you convert the file to AVI or WMV then I expect it will load and play OK using SCS.

btw, sometime ago I tried to use the VLC DLL with SCS, but I just cannot get the libvlc.dll to display the video image on an SCS window or control. Just downloaded and installed the latest version of VLC - same problem.

Converted it to .avi using pitivi - same problem. This is on a WIndoze 2000 platform. Will try it on Windoze 7 and report back.

d_korman wrote:Converted it to .avi using pitivi - same problem. This is on a WIndoze 2000 platform. Will try it on Windoze 7 and report back.

The MP4 file works OK on Win7, but the avi file freezes SCS.

That's strange. I haven't heard of AVI files causing problems before. How large is the smallest version of this file? (Wondering if you can upload it to dropbox or similar, if it's not too large.)

.mp4 is about 10.7MB. .avi about 17MB - I've uploaded them to dropbox and sent you a sharing invite.

Both files load and play OK on my machine, running SCS 11.2.5 under Windows 7. The only issue I had was that with the .avi file the thumbnail and preview image both show a solid white image in the editor. However, when I click the play button in the editor then the video plays OK in the preview window. From the main cue list, both the .avi and the .mp4 file play OK.

However, I was surprised that the .avi file was only 17MB since the .mp4 file was 10MB. So I ran some file conversions using the NCH Prism Video Converter. I'm using version 1.95 of that software, although I expect there's a newer version available now.

• Converting the .mp4 file to .avi using Prism created a file 510MB in size (hence my surprise that your .avi file was only 17MB). This 510MB file played OK in SCS. The initial preview and thumbnail images in the editor were just black unless I set the 'start at' to 0.5 second or higher, which implies there's just under .5 second of black at the start of the video.
• 'Converting' your 10MB .avi file to another .avi file using Prism created a 67MB file, but this was corrupt in that the duration was only 9 seconds (instead of about 112 seconds). So Prism v1.95 cannot handle the .avi file created by pitivi. Since the pitivi .avi file cannot be handled by Prism, and crashes your instance of SCS, this suggests to me that there's something non-standard in the pitivi .avi format.
• Just to check some other conversions, I also 'converted' your .mp4 file to .mp4 using Prism. The created file was 12.6MB and played OK in SCS. I also converted the .mp4 file to .wmv using Prism and that also played OK. The .wmv file was about 67MB.

Conclusion: if you're staying with Win7 then obviously the .mp4 format is working for you. If you want or need to use the Win2000 machine, then consider converting the .mp4 file to .avi or .wmv format using the NCH Prism Video Converter.

Thanks Mike, will try that converter. Our local theatres run SCS under XP, so that's what I'll actually be doing the show on - but I don't have XP at home any more
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OK, tried that - the .avi produced by Prism runs OK in SCS on Win 7, but same problem on Win2000. I can live with that as I can add the video cue using my laptop once the rest of the effects are finished, or even at the theatre.