[QLab] Fading out audio or video cues during live show

[stbo]

Folks,

Very much new to Qlab.

I have a que list which is a mix of audio only, video only, video with
audio and fixed image cues

Most of the pieces are set pieces and have the necessary fades at
start and finish of the cue already present.

In some cases, some of the acts on stage mayt under or overrun the
duration of their cue, and what I want to be able to do is hit a key,
and have the current cue fade out at that point and in effect jump to
the end of the cue and then wait for the trigger to fire the next cue.

Is this possible?

I have been looking through the docs and also this forum and unless I
am missing something it seems to be quite complicated to achieve this?

Thank you.
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[Jason Eckenroth]

It sounds to me like you're just talking about a simple fade.

For Audio:
(1)Add a fade cue(Command-3)
(2)Drag your audio cue to the fade cue to set the target
(3)Under "Levels", set at least the cross point "knobs" to 0(all purple)
(4)Set fade time and curve to taste. Also remember to hit "stop
target when done" under levels.

For video/pictures:
(1)Add an animate cue
(2)Drag your video cue to the animate cue to set the target
(3)Under "Settings", check the box for Opacity and set it to 0%.
(4)Set duration to taste. Remember to hit "stop target when done"
under settings.

Hope that helps!

-JME

[stbo]

Jason,

Many thanks for the quick reply.

One question/observation:

From your suggestion it appears that in order to be able to fade out
any tracks in a live show for whatever reason prior to the cue
reaching it natural completion, I would need to setup a separate cue
list, and for each cue in my original list, set a fade cue and attach
it to the corresponding cue in the main list - if that makes sense!!

I presume this means there is no way to fade out a cue 'on the fly' if
there is a possibility of needing to fade it out before it
completes?? Surely this would a standard requirement for any live
show environment or am I approaching things incorrectly?

Thank you

[Jason Knox]

No separate cue list is required (if I'm understanding you correctly).  I think that you're just asking how to set up a manual fade - which is really simple once you understand the basics.

I'd recommend spending a few minutes with this video tutorial:

http://figure53.com/qlab/tutorials/2-3.php

Hope that helps, and good luck.

Jason

[Christopher Ashworth]

Hi stbo,

One way you can fade out any cue without knowing in advance what you're going to fade is to set up a Fade Cue that targets an entire cue list. This will be a "relative fade" which can then adjust every cue in the cue list down to silence.

There is not currently an equivalent way to do this with videos, so it would only work for audio.

Best,
Chris

On Nov 18, 2010, at 10:00 AM, stbo wrote:

> Jason,
>
> Many thanks for the quick reply.
>
> One question/observation:
>
> From your suggestion it appears that in order to be able to fade out
> any tracks in a live show for whatever reason prior to the cue
> reaching it natural completion, I would need to setup a separate cue
> list, and for each cue in my original list, set a fade cue and attach
> it to the corresponding cue in the main list - if that makes sense!!
>
> I presume this means there is no way to fade out a cue 'on the fly' if
> there is a possibility of needing to fade it out before it
> completes?? Surely this would a standard requirement for any live
> show environment or am I approaching things incorrectly?
>
> Thank you

________________________________________________________

[Steve Lalonde]

If I understand you correctly, you already have a sequence of fade in/out and of audio and video. 

I guess that your fades are already set to auto-continue to end on the right time.

So all you would need is to set a hot key in the trigger section of you fades to trigger them before they happen naturally. 

Otherwise, you'll have to jump in the word of target/stop/play and different cue lists. 

S
----
450 541 7482
www.stevelalonde.com

2010/11/18 stbo <stewartb...@gmail.com>

[E R Casey]

Sounds like another inquiry about a "fade the active cue" function that I was making noise about last month. This would seem like a pretty handy thing for those less than well scripted shows. Is it a difficult thing to incorporate or just not useful enough to the wider user base to make it worth adding to the base functionality?

Riley

E. R. Casey
Entertainment Sound Production
2311 Kansas Ave.
Silver Spring MD 20910
www.ESPsound.com
301-608-2180 office phone
301-608-0789 fax
301-440-2923 shoe phone

On 18 Nov 2010, at 12:16 PM, qlab-r...@lists.figure53.com wrote:

> Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2010 11:56:54 -0500
> From: Christopher Ashworth <ch...@figure53.com>
> To: "Discussion and support for QLab users." <ql...@lists.figure53.com>
> Subject: Re: [QLab] Fading out audio or video cues during live show
> Message-ID: <87BAE1D9-4307-4038...@figure53.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

>
> Hi stbo,
>
> One way you can fade out any cue without knowing in advance what you're going to fade is to set up a Fade Cue that targets an entire cue list. This will be a "relative fade" which can then adjust every cue in the cue list down to silence.
>
> There is not currently an equivalent way to do this with videos, so it would only work for audio.
>
> Best,
> Chris

________________________________________________________

[Christopher Ashworth]

On Nov 18, 2010, at 12:19 PM, E R Casey wrote:

> Sounds like another inquiry about a "fade the active cue" function that I was making noise about last month. This would seem like a pretty handy thing for those less than well scripted shows. Is it a difficult thing to incorporate or just not useful enough to the wider user base to make it worth adding to the base functionality?

I definitely see the utility -- I just need to think about how to build the idea into the system. It doesn't fit well into the current architecture. There's not a concept of "target this undefined thing that we'll define later, and oh by the way it might be more than one thing". Targets are currently always specific cues or specific files.

-C

[Andy Leviss]

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 12:26 PM, Christopher Ashworth
<ch...@figure53.com> wrote:
> I definitely see the utility -- I just need to think about how to build the idea into the system.  It doesn't fit well into the current architecture.  There's not a concept of "target this undefined thing that we'll define later, and oh by the way it might be more than one thing".  Targets are currently always specific cues or specific files.

What if it targeted the output instead of the cue? It would fade the
output out (or to black) then do a stop all.

Might be the simplest to implement way, which may or may not be the best...

--Andy

[Emery Roth III]

On Nov 18, 2010, at 12:56 PM, Andy Leviss wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 12:26 PM, Christopher Ashworth
> <ch...@figure53.com> wrote:
>> I definitely see the utility -- I just need to think about how to build the idea into the system. It doesn't fit well into the current architecture. There's not a concept of "target this undefined thing that we'll define later, and oh by the way it might be more than one thing". Targets are currently always specific cues or specific files.
>
> What if it targeted the output instead of the cue? It would fade the
> output out (or to black) then do a stop all.

What I'd really like that I can't currently do (cause I do use the fade all in a cuelist trick all the time) is the ability to fade all over 5 and still be able to trigger another cue while its fading. Fading the outputs wouldn’t fix that. Also if I've just faded the outputs, do the reset on a hard stop? Do i have to explicitly bring them back up?

Just more change for the hat.

--e

[E R Casey]

I would pile on that suggestion in an 1/16 note.

E. R. Casey
Entertainment Sound Production
2311 Kansas Ave.
Silver Spring MD 20910
www.ESPsound.com
301-608-2180 office phone
301-608-0789 fax
301-440-2923 shoe phone

On 18 Nov 2010, at 1:22 PM, qlab-r...@lists.figure53.com wrote:

> Emery Roth III <eroth...@gmail.com>

> To: "Discussion and support for QLab users." <ql...@lists.figure53.com>
> Subject: Re: [QLab] Fading out audio or video cues during live show
>
>

> What I'd really like that I can't currently do (cause I do use the fade all in a cuelist trick all the time) is the ability to fade all over 5 and still be able to trigger another cue while its fading. Fading the outputs wouldn?t fix that. Also if I've just faded the outputs, do the reset on a hard stop? Do i have to explicitly bring them back up?

[Christopher Ashworth]

Could you describe the usage scenario here?

On Nov 18, 2010, at 1:20 PM, E R Casey wrote:

> I would pile on that suggestion in an 1/16 note.
>

>> Emery Roth III <eroth...@gmail.com>
>> To: "Discussion and support for QLab users." <ql...@lists.figure53.com>
>> Subject: Re: [QLab] Fading out audio or video cues during live show
>>
>>
>> What I'd really like that I can't currently do (cause I do use the fade all in a cuelist trick all the time) is the ability to fade all over 5 and still be able to trigger another cue while its fading.

[Emery Roth III]

On Nov 18, 2010, at 1:38 PM, Christopher Ashworth wrote:

Could you describe the usage scenario here?

What I'd really like that I can't currently do (cause I do use the fade all in a cuelist trick all the time) is the ability to fade all over 5 and still be able to trigger another cue while its fading.

I use the 'Fade that targets a cuelist' for a few things...Most importantly it’s a great Oh $h!t button, when the wrong cue is playing i can take the fade and ASAP start the right cue.

I could see using it if I set up a cuelist where one track plays into the next, if i want to 'crash it forward' I could take the fade all active and hit the next cue before it ends creating a seamless crossfade.

I guess its simply that people who don't understand what's really going on (a fade stop cue targeting every cue) dont understand why you have to wait for the cue to complete.  Otherwise you take another cue and hear it for a moment as it fades with everything else and just stops.  If the solution turns out to ONLY affect active cues so that I can still take a GO on a cue that was inactive then it’s a non-issue since we all understand that you can't re-GO on a cue that is active.

[stbo]

Thanks everybody for the feedback - looks like this is an active
group....

The scenario I am trying to make is:

I have a a number of cues in a cue list. They are either backing
tracks (audio only), video (with audio) or video (no audio).

Most of the cues run through from start to finish - no problem -
especially the backing-track-based ones. I have my fades in and out
already in the rendered video. However, there would regularily be
pieces where the time was a little less specific, and in these cases,
where the video runs on past the end of the set piece I would like to
be able to fade it out based on activity onstage. There are also
situations where a fixed image is being displayed for an indeterminate
time, and so, on demand (based on an on-stage event) , I would like to
be able to manually start the fade out.

E.R. Casey put it perfectly above - 'fade the active cue' - yes
please...

Thank you

Stewart Bourke

[Paul Johnson]

I'm glad I found this group - a recent move to macs forced my change, and like the OP in this topic, all I need to do (and it happens very often) is stop a cue running when the person on stage signals 'cut', as in when the audience are ready, or he's ready. SO on my PC system, I'd hit the go button and the background music would run, then perhaps the next cue would be a crash - over the running music bed, then depending on what happens I need to kill the bed.Pretty well everyday stuff for me. I spent some time looking for a STOP button or key. Obviously there isn't one. I can use the esc key to stop everything, but is there really no stop cue button? has nobody ever pressed go by mistake, and needs to stop one cue while another continues, or have I misunderstood?

Paul

 

[Chris Ashworth]

Hi Paul,

Welcome to the list.  There are many ways to stop a running cue in QLab, including both buttons and keys:

• Select the cue in the cue list or the active cues list and press “s”

• Press the “X” button for the cue in the active cues list, etc.

You can open up the active by pressing “Command-L”, clicking the list icon at the bottom right of the window, or from the View menu.

Best,

Chris

[Gareth Risdale]

Could it be in the form of a second kind of "panic"? Like a "panic" cue (could be as an option of Stop cues) that you can define by check box or similar what would be effected, and with a set fade time, working on the assumption that audio will need to fade to infinity and opacity will need to fade to zero. This could then be hot-keyed as required.

So you can have "5 second panic audio" cue lined up to fade out whatever audio cues happen to be playing (and maybe fade out video audio to infinity also) without effecting video or camera cues that would normally crash out if you hit ESC.

I can see times in the past when I'd have used this (where I was forced to use a full panic but didn't want to lose a graphic on a screen).

Gareth

[Rich Walsh]

This is an example of a niche need for which you already have all the programming tools to create your own solution. For example, prefix every cue number that you want to be able to panic in this way with the letter "p" and use an OSC command to panic cue "p*". You'd need to mute the audio in the actual video cues and run an audio cue in parallel with them to panic just the audio.

Rich

[Gareth Risdale]

That's a great tip - thanks.

Though I would question whether it's entirely "niche" - it's live, anything can happen!

G