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In This forum you can discuss tips, tricks, and troubleshooting for Elation's Next Generation Compu Live software, "Compu Show".

This is event was music playback, tied to lighting. CompuShow was either triggering "multimedia files"(.wav files) OR an EasyShow session file. Now, I found a few problems, none of which made sense, all of which were resolved.

First, we had a issue with the guest performer's scene NOT being seen properly by the EasyShow session file. Then, even after importing it, it STILL did not see it. Please note that in testing, this was not a problem. Odd. Anyhow, I re-built the simple scene. Turns out she didn't like it, so I re-tweaked it a few times until she did. Oh man, thank you CompuShow for making this so easy! Everyone, including this performer was blown away with how quick the software can work. So, despite this negative, it turned to a positive.

Second, was an issue that also didn't show up in testing. In this case, the scene for a performer was calling a session file for Easy Show, and it would not play. The session file itself would not play either. In the session file was a single scene and a single .wav file. I simply re-did that scene in the colors I wanted(easy with palettes), then had to add the .wav file back in. However, at this point, CompuShow appeared to be acting up, so I exited and came back. This wasn't really a negative because the session file was doing the same thing. However since this was perhaps tie to Compushow freaking out, I have to discount the issue a bit.

All other issues were issues tied to "human error". I used a wrong song in a session, so had to swap it. In one song, we didn't want a blackout first, so that had to be removed. The curtain opener scene was too active in "music pulse" so I set it to a different mode and fixed it and with proper results.

So, tech rehearsal went fairly good. Showtime was FLAWLESS, which is what I needed.

I did also learn a few things, but I might need to review things.
It appears you can play more than one multi-media file play at once, or a scene and a multi-media file and a session(with audio). I like this, it gives me some other neat options. I did wish I did that differently, but I didn't and it worked out.

One other issue, but I don't think is an actual issue. When loading an hour's worth of music(all .wav files), it took longer than I would prefer to load. I don't think this is a real issue, just something worthy of mention. I could have set up a scene to call up the next song, but that would have been silly. Considering that this was the pre-show music, this wasn't a big deal.

I also learned how to use cycles. I've got all sorts of ideas how this could be better. It's not bad, but I need it to behave a certain way to ensure higher confidence and perhaps easier methods of creating perfect cycles.

While all the new knowledge I've gained in the past week won't be a fundamental change in how I do things, it does offer major new options available to me that I fill intend to exploit and do better. Since I will be working with this same group many more times, I will bave more opportunities to refine and perfect my methods of how I deal with their shows.

I'm happy with how things went this time.
Original Post
Despite the success and issues, there are still outstanding issues, which fortunately did not affect my show.

I'm about to redo a bunch of shows from the ground up. It's mostly due to trying to make things more modular and give way the heck too many options. These are the 2-hour shadowcast productions. The point here is that these show files are 2 hours of highly synchronized shows that are driven by time code.

The outstanding issue is with EasyShow, specifically "import Show". The scenes are imported, and imported into the timeline too, and even markers are inserted, relative to their position within the imported show as it is inserted into the "master show" file. The PROBLEM is that the media DOES NOT get imported.

In this instance, I am going redo the shows "one scene at a time". I will do an extensive amount of work to make the main show modular so I an rebuild it easier. I can always lay back the media. The reason behind this is that a "mash-up" between that and something else is going to take place. This modular design will allow me to simply lay stuff where it's needed, and if there's a problem area, it's limited to a small area of the show and can be fixed within a day(hopefully). Also, there's alays this one scene the cast screws with. What they don't seem to care about is that their stupidity costs me 40 hours of having to deal with crap each show and they don't put in 40 hours of rehearsal!

So, this "import show" issue where the media is being ditched out must be fixed.
Video formats needs to properly support mp4, .wmv, quicktime,in addition to the currently only properly supported .avi
Audio formats need to be more than CBR MP3's and 16-bit .wav files, but this is an area where I want to say ".wav and screw the rest".
Timecode must be in multiple flavors. As much as it may annoy others and forces me to make a few extra steps, I should be REQUIRED to choose the MTC format that I expect to use. If I'm using 23.976fps/film from the video workstation, I should have to specify this in EasyShow's session file. This is how the professionals do it. It will increase stability and accuracy. Off-sets will still need to be used, that's just a fact of life with MIDI and timecode. It's an extra step. It's done intentionally. It NEEDS to be done.

Don't mis-interpret what I'm saying. I am pleased with the software. There are some shortcomings, over-sights and some things that I know how things SHOULD and NEED to be done. I will say that with all the neat stuff I accidentally learned(and were forced to learn), I'm SUPER happy with this new knowledge and makes me like the software that much more. As I am going to start training my crew on the software, I can set things up to make it nearly as easy to simply operate as MyDMX can be, but with all the killer awesomeness that MyDMX simply can't include because of MyDMX being marketed more for people needing simplicity. That doesn't mean I'm done with MyDMX though. I have the v.1 product and I am still considering the 2.0 product just for more options.

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