Scrubbing For Rehearsal Cues

[Rich Walsh]

I'm working on something that's kind of like a dance piece to timecode with a bunch of separate IEM tracks. (They're not actually dancing to the sound of LTC... Those time signatures are tricky.)

The way they like to teach new people the plots is to watch a recording of the show whilst listening to their IEM track. The show will be played back as one big multi-channel audio file in QLab (although I need to update myself on whether it's necessary to interleave for sample-accurate sync in QLab v3 – which would save a lot of rendering time – and whether it's safe to play a 60 minute file without it falling over). I could add the video quite easily.

The thing is, that doesn't work so well when you want to jump around to specific places or roll back 30s. I don't see a way you could scrub the video to locate, and frankly any kind of load-to-time malarkey is going to get annoying – scripts or no scripts. Or, indeed, no script.

I could do this kind of random access in Pro Tools but it would be overkill. I think I can make a QuickTime file with the 16 audio channels synced to the recording video and then just play that in QuickTime Player 7 in rehearsals. Initial testing with Soundflower suggests that I will be able to route the channels to separate outputs via QuickTime Player (I don't have my Babyface with me to test with a physical interface). What's more, I've found a way of adding a TC burn and chapter markers for likely cuepoints (character entrances, that sort of thing). It all seems rather elegant compared to a DAW.

What have I missed?

As an aside, would anyone recommend between playing back LTC as part of the audio file or having QLab generate it on the fly? Hmm, I might know the answer: scrubbing...

Thanks.

Rich

[Andrew Moyer]

Use the "Load to Time" tool.
http://figure53.com/qlab/docs/load-to-time/

Does that not do what you need it to?

[micpool]

Hi Rich

Yes you can put all that into a Quicktime movie and your multitrack audio will appear in your interface mixer as discrete channels for you to route as you want. Although QT Player 7 PRO  is best for editing once you have assembled you QT movie with video audio and chapters it should play back perfectly well in QT Player X as well.

Mic

[Rich Walsh]

Ah, yes, but load to _what_ time?

"Load to time…" is useful and I wrote a whole load of scripts to extend its functionality in QLab 2: crashing fades, forcing fades, loading to just before the end… In fact I even have "Jump into a string of cues" to deal specifically with the situation where you need to pick up at an arbitrary point in a 20 minute scene in a tin shed during a monsoon where the rain and thunder beds evolve and change on a few dozen cuelines and entrances during that scene. The director couldn't understand why the tools we use for playback don't allow you to jump to a point in the timeline and hit play as Pro Tools does when he's on a re-recording stage. Or rather, because he is a very clever man, understood only too well and didn't want it to be his problem to wait while we stepped through all the cues in sequence to get to where we should be. Crashed SFX a few times doing that!

I can get by pretty well in a tech (or even a rehearsal where we can't rely on the time it takes for lighting to reset to cover our cueing up process) if I am driving, and it's a fairly traditional piece where you basically add and subtract ambiences and drop in the odd dog bark or door bell. This doesn't apply for my current rehearsal needs though – even if we had an operator who already knew the show and had been taught how to use all these macros:

• You hit GO, the director stops the rehearsal, you hit ESC; the director wants to pick up at the beginning of the last bar: how do you locate that with "Load to time…"? With a single cue you could look at the waveform, but only if you know where you stopped… So I could write some scripting to record the elapsed time to the clipboard when you panic the sequence and then paste that into the "Load to time…" slider. The pickup points will be random but not arbitrary, in that you can't rely on just having some rain running: you need to be precisely 1:37 into the rain – or maybe 0:42, or 19:67.
• What if you want to go back 10s? Again, I guess I could write a script to do that: play/pause/fwd ∆T/rwd ∆T.
• Imagine you're doing The Snowman (effectively a 30 minute music piece) and you have a list of load-to times for key events but the director wants to pick up from one you don't have, like the Snowman closing the refrigerator. How do you find that point?
• This is the killer: you can't _scrub_ the video in any useful way, as far as I can tell.

Bizarrely for this kind of rehearsal what you need is effectively a multi-track DVD player: Pro Tools, Logic, Nuendo, FCP, etc. I can't see a way of bodging this functionality into QLab without, as I said, "load-to-time malarkey". It's a weird distinction between our linear cue sequence with non-linear cueing and a DAW's linear timeline with non-linear access. I did come up with a pithier summary for the director, but I can't remember what it was…

Rich

[Rich Walsh]

Is it solid enough to give them a 60-minute 16-track file to play with and run away? I ruled out QT X as I couldn't figure out how to route the audio channels (don't know what interface I'll get yet, so it may not have a soft mixer)… Is QT 7 available in Mavericks & Yosemite, or do I need to ask for an old machine?

Ta.

Rich

[micpool]

What you could do is have your show file open in Qlab with a fire all group cue with your video and all your audio tracks etc.

Then have a copy of the video file open in Quicktime player 

You can then scrub the file in QT Player and transfer the current time of the player  to a LOAD to time cue in Qlab with something like

tell application "QuickTime Player"

set thecurrenttime to current time of the front document

end tell

tell application id "com.figure53.qlab.3" to tell front workspace

set load time of cue "LOAD" to thecurrenttime

delay 0.1

start cue "LOAD"

end tell

Mic

[Rich Walsh]

Neat: the QuickTime Player QLab Remote Navigator. If only QT Player spoke OSC…

That's actually a really good idea, particularly if QLab then feeds back to cue up QT Player to stay in sync. It means the operator is exposed to the final cuelist structure earlier too.

Thanks Mic.

Rich

[micpool]

You can also navigate by chapters in QTPlayer too, and transfer the times.

[Chris Ashworth]

This has been a very interesting exchange and I have been taking copious notes. Perhaps we can build this in more directly in a future version.

-C

[Joel Lundgren]

Hi Rich,

We are looking for something very similar and would love to pick your brain on the subject, actually we are looking for someone to make an apple script for us so that we can play back recordings for rehearsals in reaper, trigger from qlab and get the markers names as per qlab.
If this could also correspond to a snapshot on a Digico SD10 that would be even better.

Got more details, obviously we pay you :)

Contact me on jo...@joelaudio.com

Many thanks
Joel