Time of day cues with loops

[ljb2of3]

SCS looks like it will work nicely for a show I'm planning, but there is one very important feature that isn't available in the demo that I need to test (it isn't marked as available in the demo on the license comparison page)

Here is my plan... SCS will play the audio tracks and trigger the lighting console via telnet, I've tested it and that works.

This is a christmas light display that will run every hour, but there are actually two shows that run on alternating hours. I'll call these A and B, these run about 45 minutes each. In between each show is a "preshow" state that is just some soft music and a static lighting look.

The proposed schedule is as follows:

6 pm: Show A
Auto Follow: Preshow
7 pm: Show B
Auto: Preshow
8 pm: Show A
Auto: Preshow
9 pm: Show B
Auto: Preshow
10 pm: Show A
Auto: Preshow
11 pm: Show B
Auto: Blackout/Reset for next day

I've seen the help file article about goto cues which look good for creating part of the logic, but I'm not sure how to handle running the same sequence at different times. It is possible to do what I've proposed, and if so, can you point me in the right direction for trying this out?

I'd like this to happen in a complete automation fashion every day for a month. I've seen the tip about restarting the computer every 3 weeks, so I don't mind rebooting the computer once in the middle of the run, but total automation the rest of the time would be nice.

Thanks!

-Landy

[Mike Daniell]

Almost there I've just put together a test that looks like this:

• Pre is the preshow playlist and is set to continuous play. This cue is set to auto-start at a nominated time of day, which you would set to some time before 6pm.
• A1-A4 are the cues for 'Show A'. In this test I have just included 2 audio file cues (A2 and A3), but the other important cues are A1 which fades out and hibernates the Preshow playlist, and cue A4 which resumes the Playlist. A1 is set to Manual start, but A2-A4 are all auto-starts, 0 seconds after the end of the preceding cue.
• B1-B4 are the cues for 'Show B' and are set up in a similar manner to A1-A4.
• The remaining cues are all 'Go To' cues set to start at specific times of day. I have named these cues 6pm, 7pm, etc, and they are set to auto-start at these times.

SCS should be started before the scheduled start time of the preshow playlist, eg start SCS at about 5:45pm (or earlier). At 6pm the 6pm 'Go To' cue will fire which will go to and play 'Show A', fading out the playlist at the start of the show and resuming the playlist at the end of the show. At 7pm the 7pm 'Go To' cue will fire which will go to and play 'Show B', also fading out the playlist at the start and resuming the playlist at the end. At 8pm 'Show A' is again played, and do on.

The only thing this doesn't handle is resetting the time-based-cues (TBC's) for the next day. The blackout, of course, isn't a problem because you can have a time-based cue set for something like 11:55pm to stop all cues and send blackout commands to external equipment, etc. But with the current version of SCS you would need to restart the program the next day (any time after midnight) to re-awaken the TBC's. It would be feasible to add a feature to SCS to auto-reset the TBC's at midnight or possibly even some other time of day (eg 3am).

[ljb2of3]

Mike, this looks great!

I was thinking though this last night after I went to bed and came up with a cue list very similar to that. I got up this morning wanting to try it out and discovered you had already done it for me!

By day, I'm a sysadmin and have done a good bit of programming myself. I've already figured out a workaround if SCS can't be reset automatically... I can use the sysinternals tools or autoit to close and reopen SCS via a scheduled task, effectively resetting everything.

(just a thought, make the reset a note command like goto already is, being able to script things would be awesome... throwing in some logic like if statements would make it even more flexible)

-Landy

[Mike Daniell]

Time-of-day reset now available in SCS 10.7.3. This is in Production Properties under the Time Profiles tab.