Successive Timings

[simon.c...@gmail.com]

Hey team. I have a show that all sits on one timeline but I want to split up into musical cues to aid with rehearsals etc. If I put in a green group and a piece in the middle changes length then all pieces afterwards are affected, but if I use a blue group with either follow ons or a bunch of green groups with pre wait star cues to start the next one then I dont see anywhere the total show length which would be useful. What are others doing for this sort of show where the whole show is on a timeline but flexible pieces inside it?

[Paul]

Not sure I quite understand the question, so apologies if I've got this wrong.

By "green group" you seem to mean Timeline group and by "blue group" you mean Start First and Enter group (just for clarity Playlist groups have a red outline).  Timeline groups will start all cues at the same time and you set pre-waits to arrange the timing. For 'Start First' groups the first cue is started and then what happens depends on the Continue/Auto-Follow flag for each of the subsequent cues.

You can nest groups, so if you wanted all your show to be on a Timeline you can put different sections into groups (either Timeline or Start First) so you can more easily find things in rehearsal. You need to set up the pre-waits so the whole thing plays in the right order. That will also give you a total running time for the cues.

   

One thing I find helpful in rehearsal is to have an another cue list with a series of "Load at" and Start cues which target the most common rehearsal points; label these clearly eg  "scene 1 second song 30s in". I adjust/add to these as we move through rehearsals to suit the situation. Also useful to use pause (on the [ key) and use Active Cues panel to adjust the position in the audio.  

If the director likes to jump to random places in different tracks, I have used a script to prompt for the track and time in track. You can also use the (paid) QJump utility to go to bar number within a track if the MD works like that. But these are probably overkill most of the time. 

You could also use  a simple script to find the total duration of every media track in your workspace:

tell application id "com.figure53.QLab.5" to tell front workspace

set totdur to 0

repeat with myCue in (cues whose q type is "Audio" or q type is "Video")

set totdur to totdur + (duration of myCue)

end repeat

display dialog (totdur div 60) & "m " & ((totdur mod 60) as integer) & "s" as string with title "Total duration of media Cues"

end tell

[micpool]

Hi Paul

I think you may have misread Simon's question. The scenario he described was one where he was anticipating a lot of swapping out of tracks and to avoid having to recalculate all the subsequent  prewaits in a timeline group after doing so.  He also wanted the ability to just play from a point in a group with the subsequent cues following on  without loading to time

Using Fire first groups with follow ons solves this problem, but because a fire first group has no duration a lot of the timing info is lost. Also the duration of a timeline group containing multiple fire first groups  is the time of the last prewait on a nested group within  the timeline group group

To a certain extent you can read total times for any point in a group by using the load to time slider, (and some may ask that, if the load to time slider knows where it is within the duration of a fire first group, then why can't the group itself know this and state its duration?) 

Nested Playlists in a playlist group behave better for certain uses, but lack the control over overlaps etc.

And of course loops and devamps, take  any concept of durations into another dimension.

This screenshot shows the load to time window displaying the true length of the Timeline group (which differs from the duration the Timeline group itself displays)

It also has an example of nested playlist groups which does display the total time correctly. (The top level Playlist can also be loaded to time and the following playlists will trigger as expected, so for many uses this is the best solution.

Mic