Pause every .5 seconds

[topherbr...@gmail.com]

Hello all, 

 I'm working on a new production of the play Eureka Day. An important part of the play involves a projection of the chat for a video conference, during which 143 cues are fired in a short amount of time to show chat bubbles going up a screen. I've built out a video file in which each chat bubble appears at .5 second intervals (the play moves so fast that I don't think I can get away with making the cues any longer). 

  My thought was to make a group cue that includes a play cue for the video, then a pause cue on a .5 second delay. My issue is that, even though I've specified .5 seconds, the timing on the cues are wildly inconsistent. Sometimes it pauses at .43 seconds, sometimes it pauses after .51 seconds, sometimes it pauses anywhere in between.

  Is there a way to make a cue stop when it reaches a specific time? I can think of some pretty tedious, clunky solutions involving devamps but I feel like I must be missing something here. 

Thanks,

-Topher

[micpool]

Timed pauses will never work, because the prewaits on the pauses  are using a different clock to the video (or audio clock)

The simplest thing would be to re-render 143 sequentially numbered clips in the editor you made the video in..

If you originally made the video from a tall image file, then you could just use that image and use geometry fade cues to move the image up a fixed number of pixels on each cue.

You could also script  ffmpeg to split your video into individual 5 sec clips.

Alternatively, you could use a script to place slices in your video cue at 5 sec intervals and then use a single  timeline group cue to play and immediately devamp to a pause cue on the next slice and go to the timeline group cue again ready fror the next cue.

Mic

[micpool]

Attached is a screen recording of a video with continuous timecode set up to pause every 1 second using the devamp slices method

The video cue is sliced  by setting markers every second with this script

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

set theTT to slice markers of cue "1"

set theInterval to 1 --interval between markers in seconds

set theCue to cue "1" --target cue

set theNumber to q number of theCue

set theDuration to the duration of theCue

set theTime to theInterval

repeat while theTime is less than theDuration

set oscCmd to "/cue/" & theNumber & "/addSliceMarker " & (theTime as string)

do shell script "echo " & oscCmd & " | nc -u -w 0 127.0.0.1 53535"

set theTime to theTime + theInterval

delay 0.1

end repeat

end tell

And then is played using the  repeating Timeline Group Cue.

Generally  this method is accurate to about a frame so it's best to have a still image for 4 frames (2 frames either side of the slice point when you make the video)

Mic