Show Cue System

Hi Everyone
Has anyone come across the situtation of both the time clocks of any cue stopping for 2 or 3 secounds duing a cue's playback, it always catches itself back up and the audio seems to be unaffected. But this just causes me a worry when giving someone else a countdown cue like a props or stagecrew move to go. I wondered if this was SCS or if it was the laptop display causing it.
Anyone anyideas???

Peter

Hi
I had something similar happen when running a test to see just how many cues SCS could play at once. With a daft number of cues (about 40) all playing at once, unsuprisingly the displays became very slow to update, the audio seemed to be fine, as far as I could tell with all that noise going on.
I recon a chunkier computer would solve the problem.

Cheers
Richard

Peter Jackson wrote:Has anyone come across the situtation of both the time clocks of any cue stopping for 2 or 3 seconds duing a cue's playback, it always catches itself back up and the audio seems to be unaffected.

This is possibly due to SCS pre-buffering a later cue. Do you have a lot of back-to-back cues in the production, or video cues? And are your audio files etc all on your local hard disk - not on a network drive or USB drive? And finally, following up on Richard's reply, what processor speed and RAM do you have?

Hi Richard
Thanks for your reply (40 cues at one time though, that must have been mind numming)

Hi Mike

Some of the cues are back to back (pantomime calls for a lot of quick sounds in sequence) but I noticed at last night performance it seemed to be all the earlier dance music cues and after about 20 minutes in all seemed fine. No video cues, all audio. All in Aiff format as they were all prepared on a Mac, I did notice however that when a long track was playing (4 minutes +) the other cues were showing, but it said they were not loaded, but they did play straight away on cue.
My machine is purpose built with two Genuine Intel ® CPU T2300 @ 1.66GHz each
2 Gb RAM
A Hitachi HTS54 HD 120Gb with a 40/80 split with the 40 for all programme storage and the 80 for file storage which is only used for show files during a production nothing else. Defraged very week.
I have Norton Security installed but no other programmes run during a show.
As I said originally there seem to be no effect to the playing audio as I am sure the choreographer would have soon said or 'SHOUTED' something at me.
And I'm running SCS 10.6.0.2
Windows XP Professional SP 2 and is fully updated.

Peter

Under General Options / Permanent Options, what do you have for Max. No. of Audio Files to Pre-Open? The default setting is 5 so you could try increasing that to at least one greater than the maximum number of cues you run back-to-back. As with any change, I suggest you run a test replicating the timing of an actual production, before using this new setting in a performance. You may need to close and restart SCS to fully test the effect of this change.

Thanks for this Mike I've only got 3 shows left so I'll try your suggestion on Sunday and see if it makes any difference.
Peter

Hi Mike

I reset the number of items to pre-open files to 6 as I only ever had 3 files in very quick succession but this did not seem to have any effect on the clock display. But I did notice again that when one track was playing all other tracks said "not loaded" but they fired off fine everytime, even if they were manual follow on cues.
Thanks for your time in replying Mike and I'll keep a check over the next couple of shows in January to any differences.

Peter.