SCS and quicktime

[danielmeakin]

Hi Mike

i've got a gig coming up that's after a cheap way to synchronise multichannel audio playback (via SCS) with video playback (QT or any similar PC based format). I'm aware that integrating video into SCS is probably not on the cards right now, but was wondering if you'd experimented with running a simple video cart player program that could be triggered by midi commands from SCS. i've had some limited sucess using loopbe1 virtual midi port to route the midi back into a VJ program, but most of the VJ software is quite clumsy and has a lot of unnecessary features for my uses.

I found this site http://defekt.nl/openvid/ where the author apparently has found a way to cue up quicktime files using midi messages, albeit by his own admission it's quite a clumsy hack. i'm not a programmer, so i thought i'd ask your opinion on this idea and see if you could get it to work (if you're bored on some long rainy evening).

cheers

Dan

[Mark Johnson]

Dan,

I have done shows syncing audio and video a couple of times using a program called Grid2 as suggested in forum article
http://www.soundcuesystem.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27

Grid2 doesn't seem to be available any more as the publisher is relasing a more in depth (complicated & more expensive???) version - if you contact them directly, you may still be able to purchase and get a licence key for Grid2.

The product was stable in use for me and because of prebuffering the video triggered instantly when the MIDI messages were sent and stayed pretty well in sync with the audio considering they were on different machines. If you need something very tight in sync though (eg singing with video of singer) then I'm not sure this method would be accurate enough.

I'm sure there are other products which can play video triggered from MIDI messages (or free) but I did do fairly extensive searching last June and didn't really find anything to compete for the price.

Hope that helps.

Mark.

[danielmeakin]

thanks Mark,

i might have found a solution, if anyone's interested, for cuing video on the same machine.

I ran arkaos as a video cuing solution, which seems to be quite stable as long as the hardware is fast enough.

I ran SCS at the same time, which didn't seem to pose any conflict problems, athough i'm running on a fairly low powered laptop so had to wait sometimes for the graphics to catch up while switching between programs.

For the midi side of things, i used LoopBe1, a midi driver that allows you to feed the midi output from one program to the input of another. it has a feedback detection monitor so will avoid the problem of a midi loop crashing things.

Then i spent a while figuring out how to get arkaos to act as a cueing system as opposed to a VJ program, disabling as much as possible, following which it was fairly simple. You need two Midi cues per video trigger, a note on and a note off, and the velocity needs to be at max, so apart from using up a chunk of SCS cue space, it seemed to work fairly well.

i'm gonna spend some time troubleshooting this, so if anyone wants to know more they can email me info@danielmeakin.com

cheers!