HomeHomeSupportSupportHelpHelpEasy way to do more than a dozen clips via MIDI?Easy way to do more than a dozen clips via MIDI?
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02/06/2009 04:39
 

 Is there an easy way to do more than 12 clips via MIDI? I can assign MIDI events to each of the first 12 clips, but the ones after that don't seem to be assignable. It looks like I can use 'next clip' and 'previous clip' but then I can't randomly access the clips any more. I'm using version 3, in a theater environment. Thanks.

 
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02/06/2009 08:37
 

With the current version of software there is no way to randomly access more than 12 clips. It could easily be changed to allow more. How would you want this to work? I could set it up so a midi command would change the clip and the velocity would specify which clip, would this be usable or helpful?

You could use space clips in version 3.2 as a way to try and access more clips. It would allow you to sub divide your clips into lists which you could randomly access. This may or may not help you though.

 

 
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02/06/2009 18:21
 

Actually, I did not include all of the information.

So far I have been using Screen Monkey for more than 12 clips by using the page up and page down features. This actually lets me randomly access a fair number of clips, really just limited by how many page up and page down commands I want to put into the show control software. We are using SFX and it lets you do strings of arbitrary MIDI commands. So if I need 36 clips, I put two page downs at the start of each clip, then the appropriate number of page ups. This works fairly well, though it is a bit heavy. The ability to call up random clips by having the velocity specify the clip number sounds like it would work very well! (addendum: As I look over the ETC website, it appears we can upgrade the software on our console and have it send cue numbers via MIDI. If it does that, they will be sent as program changes, with the program change number being the cue number. Would that be doable? If it were, we and anyone else who wanted to use this could hook an ETC light board right to Screen Monkey and put video cues right in the cue list. Very cool!)

In this show it sounds like we will be using Midi Show Control from the light board to run the video clips. The light board (an ETC Express) only spits out 'Go!' commands, so the random access really won't matter in this case. With the new spreadsheet cue view I think it will work perfectly this time around.

So I suppose this has really become a 'please add a command to randomly access cues, if you have a chance' request. Adding MSC seems very specialized and not likely to be helpful for many people, unless other users also want to be able to hook cue lists to their light boards. Even then it really is just basic 'Go!' functionality, coming via a SYSEX message.

 
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02/06/2009 18:25
 

The commands the ETC spits out are listed starting on page 280 of the user manual here: http://www.etcconnect.com/docs/docs_downloads/manuals/Express_Two-scene_Preset_v3.1_User_Manual.pdf

Since Screen Monkey already supports 'next cue' functionality, and we can tie that to Program Change 0, I think we are good for this show. But it sure would be neat to allow the other commands to randomly access cues! Obviously Screen Monkey might not be happy running 1000 video cues, but any block of 127 seems reasonable with a fast modern computer.

 
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03/06/2009 09:26
 

Glad that you can already do what you want. I have already added the action to play a clip where the data2 value is the index of the clip to play. This would not work with Program Change but from reading the ETC manual you can also use Control Change which allows you to index up to 127 clips. This will be available in the next release.

I have also extended the number of assignable clips from 12 to 20.

Let us know how you get on.

 

 
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HomeHomeSupportSupportHelpHelpEasy way to do more than a dozen clips via MIDI?Easy way to do more than a dozen clips via MIDI?


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