Show Cue System

Perhaps a method of triggering cues by actual time of day (with the ability to cancel if necessary)?

For instance, at 10, 5 and 2 minutes before each performance, we run a prerecorded announcement in the house. If they could be triggered automatically, that would be great.

Well, you could easily trigger one cue at 10 minutes, with the 5 minute and 2 minute announcements as linked follow cues. Then you are only hitting the button one time.

Personally, I think this option is better than anything auto-triggering by itself based on a perceived time of day. Sometimes it it best to have a human involved, if only slightly - at least in my opinion.

moonthink wrote:Personally, I think this option is better than anything auto-triggering by itself based on a perceived time of day. Sometimes it it best to have a human involved, if only slightly - at least in my opinion.

I'm not sure I agree with you there, I spent last Summer freelancing as a tech at Hever Lakeside Theatre, and ending up lashing-up a timeswitch and a minidisc player to run the pre-show announcements purely because tech staff were thin on the ground and I couldn't gaurantee being in the box at 7:25 to start the pre-show announcements for an 8:00 performance.

Trying to get happy picnicers, out for an evenings entertainment, into the open-air theatre from the banks of the lake up to 1 mile away was no easy game...

In this situation it was really important to make sure that the announcements to get the punters in started on time, it didn't matter if the show went up at 8:00 or 8:05 - that depended on front-of-house and the last few announcements were manually triggered as required (by me!) anyway from 7:58 onwards - by which time all the pre show checks would be complete and I would be sitting quietly in the box waiting to rock-and roll

Just my two-penneth!

Couch Potatoe

I too would support this requirement. I've had to stop 'micing up' performers in the dressing room and scamper up to the sound box to fire off the pre-show announcements before now, so it would be useful to be able to leave it to SCS.

Adding a feature for time-based cues in SCS is basically very easy to do, but there are a couple of issues that need to be resolved:

1. If you have some pre-show music playing at the time then it would be necessary to fade-down this music for the announcement and then fade-up the music again afterwards.
2. If you have matinees as well as evening performances, or any other situation where you have different scheduled start times for the show, then SCS needs to handle the different start times. In my experience, matinees often have shorter pre-show times than evening performances, so an announcement you may want to make 20 minutes before an evening performance you may want to make 15 minutes before a matinee performance.

Incorporating time-based cues is quite possible, but I need to sort out the best way to resolve these issues. Any comments?

1. Surely SCS handles this already. I have background music playing (btw thanks for fixing the 'big' WAV file restriction) and then I trigger a level change to take the music down a bit, followed by an automatic sound cue which is the announcement, and finally an automatic level change cue to bring the music back up again. Surely all that is needed is the ability to play the first level change cue at a specified time - or am I missing something?

2. That's a good point. I suppose the only way round it is to manually edit the time-based cue on arrival before the show and before starting the background music.

I must admit I tend to agree with Martin, a little "messing around" at the design stage to get the sequence you want is no big deal...

And manually tweaking the start time on occasion is a small price to pay for the ability to automate the start in the first place!

Cheers for now...

Couch Potatoe

Yes, you're quite right about using the 3-cue sequence of level change / audio file / level change. Thanks for pointing that out.

Regarding the start times, I'm considering providing start time profiles, defined in the cue file, and when you load the cue file you will be asked which profile you want to use. You could give names to these profiles, like "Matinee", "Evening", etc. You would only be asked which profile to use if you have two or more profiles defined and used in the cue file.

Mike - Sounds good to me.

Martin wrote:Mike - Sounds good to me.

Seconded!

This profile game sounds like fun - are you thinking about multiple times within a profile along the lines of: -

Profile-A:
time queue 1 runs at 19:30
time queue 2 runs at 19:45
time queue 3 runs at 19:55

Profile-B:
time queue 1 runs at 14:10
time queue 2 runs at 14:20
time queue 3 runs at 14:25

That would be amazingly cool

Cheers for now!

Couch Potatoe

Spot on.

Can't Wait!