Cue Time Elapsed/Remaining on a Surface

[Max Pagel]

Heya,

I have seen the scripts for a countdown timer to a specific time. BUT has anyone figured out a way to show cue time elapsed/remaining on a surface? I have a show caller that would love to have a screen with that info on it.

Even better would be a way to also show the cue name and the next cue, but that might be a bit much to ask for!

Thanks!

[micpool]

I'm not sure I totally understand what you are trying to achieve, but wouldn't the simplest thing to do to provide the show caller with all the info they could possibly want be to provide a split of the sound operators cue list screen.

Otherwise how would any script know which cue times you wanted to display, as you might have many cues running simultaneously

Mic

[Rich Walsh]

One possible way:

1. Make a video of a countdown that is as long as you need
2. Have your GO trigger fire a script instead of firing the cuelist directly
3. Have that script adjust two titles cues – one that shows the cue that is about to be fired, and one that shows what the other title had previously (you’ll need to figure what to do when starting from cold, if you see what I mean)
4. Then have the script get the duration of the cue that is about to be fired (exactly what that means is an open-ended question, so you’ll need to define your own use case) and fire it
5. Then have the script load the countdown video to an appropriate time and fire that

If you want to count up as well as down then make two videos. I think playing a video is less taxing than repeatedly updating a live titles cue, but it’s worth trying it out with one of Mic’s clock solutions.

You could also look at QDisplay, and whether that could be persuaded to do what you want. I’ve posted some stuff about using that for countdowns before.

Rich

[micpool]

One thing to remember about countdown vids  of this sort is that the frame rate doesn't need to exceed your accuracy requirement. So if you only need whole seconds 1 fps will suffice. If you want 10th 10fps etc.

Also don't make them any bigger than the pixel dimensions you need to display the text.

Mic

[Rich Walsh]

Here’s a very rough demo with QDisplay; you’ll need the latest version. You should add some cues to put the QDisplay window in the right place, and generally tart the messages up a bit. You could easily add the cue on standby, but you’ll see from the example how meaningless this approach is in general: unless you’re in CD player mode, you are going to have more than one cue playing at once…

Rich

[Phil Manson]

Hiya,

This DISPLAY usage is perfect for what I need, playing one CUE only at a time, and therefore giving cue information to the Stage Manager and DSMs at the same time. Perfect

One thing though -

I can seem to change the MESSAGE SIZE font to be bigger or smaller, but this doesn't seem to affect the size of the TIMER?

Am I missing something, or does the timer font stay the same size ?

Fingers crossed

PHIL

On Thursday, September 15, 2016 at 11:07:59 AM UTC+1, Max Pagel wrote:

[Rich Walsh]

I think that’s fixed in QDisplay – but it’s open source so you could recompile it…

There are at least 2 other ways of doing this:

1. Make a video that counts down and is longer than your longest cue; load it to the time remaining that matches the current cue; play it
2. Poll the appropriate elapsed properties via AppleScript every second and construct a live Titles Cue, ie: get action elapsed, subtract it from duration and set title to that time

Rich

[Phil Manson]

Hi all

Have downloaded the zipped file from GitHub - big thanks to Mic for pointing me in the right direction (👍👍), but it would seem that the time remaining size is still very small and doesn't adjust when using AppleScript to adjust font size.

Would love to have a tweak within the coding but haven't got the foggiest idea where to start.

are there any pointers or obvious first steps that anyone could assist with. ?

ATB

Phil

[Rich Walsh]

Open it in Xcode and edit the xib file to change the font size of the Countdown Label text field. You’ll need to fiddle around with the size of the box to make it fit. Recompile.

Rich

[Phil Manson]

Many thanks for this !!

Will post results.....

Ta

P