[QLab] Experience with Qlab and some improvement requests

Andreas Grill

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Sep 16, 2010, 6:06:09 PM9/16/10

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Hey Folks!

Just want to tell you about my experience with Qlab. I did a automatic show on the royal museum in Stockholm, Sweden this spring. The exhibition is about royal wedding dresses back to the 16th century. Our mission was to do a fully automatic show that could be started and stopped by one of the museum guides with no knowledge of Qlab.

We build a system with a mac pro (Spring 2009) quad, a RME Fireface 400, MIDI solution F8 and a box with 6 buttons to control the show, Lanbox LCX to controll light. The show was mixed on Logic on set, a wunderful stone arches room. We did a 5.1 mix + 2, added backstage stereo for bigger surround. Genelec 8020 surrounding the audience, and a sub bass backstage. We also used Qlab to show video and slides projected directly on the stone wall. The show is done in two language, Swedish and English and is 18 minutes long.

We encountered some problems during the process. Most of them involving lights. We had to use existing 12v halogen spotlights and we had many problems with electrical transformers. We ended up switching them all to magnetical.

Our light designer where not so happy with Lanbox and it was a painfull process to program it (and loosing the entire show after a reset when we learned that "save show" doesn't necessarily mean that the show was saved. That has do be done on two different locations, so we had to program the lights for the show all over again)

However Qlab worked fine most of the time except for some weird crashes during programming. 10 shows a day since end of may and when its done in october, it has been showed for over 1350 times and so far we did not have a single crash during performance.

Some pictures can be seen here (sorry the english version is not very informative and this one is in swedish)

http://lrk.lsh.se/default.asp?id=6779&ptid=&refid=7358&filename=&xmlfilename=

Here are some improvements I like to see. And forgive me if they already exist or could be done in a different way!

A feature I'd like to see on Qlab is a possibility to switch the screen over to a "easy user interface" that anybody could use. It should be a blank (black) screen that I could add buttons like: Play show, Stop, Pause, Panic etc. Maybe password protected so no one could mess with the programing or the computer. A few years ago I worked with a lightsoftware called Showmagic. It had this function.

24 hour clock - We in europe who don't use AM and PM prefer this :-)

Stop all cue - Similar to the "Stop all" toolbar button.

Animation cue - Been able to see how a animation ends. Meaning, when I for example doing a resize of a video I need to know how it's going to look like.

Warning for running cues - When I have video or audio cue running that is faded out that I don't know of and that is taking power from the system.

MIDI monitor - So I can see what is going on internally with MIDI (Yes I know there is a great app for this " Snoize" but I want it build in.

Color control for video -

Advanced multi audio editing - Ever since I started with SFX ten years ago I wanted to see a linear type of editing and audio sequences, like Logic. Also including surround mixing.

Easy sync with a backup computer - An easy way to sync Qlab with an identical workspace on a backup computer and a easy way to switch if main computer crashes.

Turn of audio in video - A video file that contains audio that I don't need to hear. An easy way to turn it of so it doesn't play and take resources from the computer. Now I have to turn down the level, right?

A more detailed manual -

Andy Leviss

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Sep 16, 2010, 7:50:16 PM9/16/10

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On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 6:06 PM, Andreas Grill <and...@gronaljud.se> wrote:
> A feature I'd like to see on Qlab is a possibility to switch the screen over
> to a "easy user interface" that anybody could use. It should be a blank
> (black) screen that I could add buttons like: Play show, Stop, Pause, Panic
> etc.

This seems like it would want to be pretty customizable to the end
user's needs, so I'd suggest that Max/MSP or PureData could do this
quite easily now, sending MIDI messages via the IAC bus to QLab.

> Stop all cue - Similar to the "Stop all" toolbar button.

If you're running on a single cue list, you can make a Stop cue
targeted to the list as a whole. If it's multiple cue lists, send a
MIDI cue with the "stop all" trigger back through the IAC bus. This
gets marginally trickier when you need to also use an external source
for MIDI triggers, but there are standalone utilities that can merge
the data.

> Easy sync with a backup computer - An easy way to sync Qlab with an
> identical workspace on a backup computer and a easy way to switch if main
> computer crashes.

Many ways exist, although it depends on your definition of easy, I
suppose. I'm leary of methods that are based in the same software
you're trying to back up, since that relies on the same components
you're worried about failing, which seems self-defeating. But my
development partner and I have some ideas on some ways to do
self-monitoring backups with manual override, so we may have some
stuff along this line eventually.

--Andy (who specializes in building redundant QLab systems)
--------------
Duck's Echo Sound
The premier source for QLab playback systems, MIDI controllers, and
other control devices
http://DucksEchoSound.com
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Rich Walsh

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Sep 16, 2010, 7:59:25 PM9/16/10

to Discussion and support for QLab users.

On 17 Sep 2010, at 00:50, Andy Leviss wrote:

>> Stop all cue - Similar to the "Stop all" toolbar button.
>
> If you're running on a single cue list, you can make a Stop cue
> targeted to the list as a whole. If it's multiple cue lists, send a
> MIDI cue with the "stop all" trigger back through the IAC bus. This
> gets marginally trickier when you need to also use an external source
> for MIDI triggers, but there are standalone utilities that can merge
> the data.

No need to merge: QLab picks up triggers from all MIDI inputs on the system.

Rich

Andy Leviss

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Sep 16, 2010, 9:54:53 PM9/16/10

to Discussion and support for QLab users.

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 7:59 PM, Rich Walsh <rich...@mac.com> wrote:
> No need to merge: QLab picks up triggers from all MIDI inputs on the system.

*smacks forehead* Um, yeah. Brain farts like this are what three days
staring at mult tails and labels in the shop will do to my brain :-D

As usual, Rich is absolutely correct. I was thinking of the channel
selection, which of course isn't an input selection.

--A

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