Best way to Save Cues?

vvvv beta general
1

Greetings Wise People

I’m trying to develop a visual composition system for use in a theatre environment, and this will probably be the first of many questions Ill be asking…

FYI I’m fairly new to VVVV, and I’m not coming from a programming background. I am however determined.

Due to the theatre-based nature of this project this is the workflow I want to have:

You plot a cue - which consists of a number of quads with filestreams and filetextures arranged on a canvas, you should be able to control any paramater of any number of quads.

You then save the cue, giving it a number somewhere in the cuelist.

You then define the transition between it and the next/previous cue in the list. (might look at TimelinerSA for this…)

Then, for the show, the cuelist is played back - using some kind of simple ‘one button’ controller. The important part is that the playback interface requires no special knowledge - so a stage manager thats never seen VVVV can run it.

The last detail is that all the cue info has to be absolute, so if you recall cue X you get cue X on screen regardless of what you had on screen beforehand.

Anyone who is familiar with strand/etc/avab lighting desks will know where I’m going with this…

My questions at this point are about the saving and playback of cues

Has anyone tried to do something like this before? Can you give me any general advice?

Is there some kind of inbuilt method for saving a snapshot of current XML data or something?

If there is no convenient method, is this thinking right:
I’ll have to write/parse every potential parameter (all the pins of transform 3d/blend mode/anything else that might be useful) into a textfile or similar, then write a ‘unparser’ to put it back into the rendering engine for playback when the cue is run. May be made more complex by having multiple quads, eg spreaded data, because there will be a different number of spreads in each cue…

Any help you can give me is appreciated.

Cheers -
derformer

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Has anyone tried to do something like this before? Can you give me any general advice?

Is there some kind of inbuilt method for saving a snapshot of current XML data or something?

The most straightforward way would be having one spreaded IOBox for each parameter. All IOBoxes should have as many rows as you have cues. Then GetSlice the right value out of each IOBox. With this technique you can save all values in the patch without having to resort to external XML files.

One important advantage of this technique is that you dont break any cue-files when you need to add or change a new parameters duing rehearsals.

Another helpful technique is nesting this (also known as database normalisation). if you have many parameters eg for transitions, make separate IOBoxes and GetSlices for them and just use a transition id column into your Cue IOBoxes.

Sift (String) might get handy if you dont like numbers.

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Cheers for that! I’ll give it a go.

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hi deformer, i m new also to vvvv, i m working also in theatre field, and i have a programming background.
if you are interrested we can try to work on a collaborative patch to handle cue’s logic in vvvv and create an open patch for every one, fitting the specific needs of our field.

cheers, christoph

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regarding the getslice-hint from oschatz you may have a look at the P (VVVV)-modules to be found at kalle.Modules.VVVV. some small and reliable modules exactly for you purposes.

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Thankyou kalle

Just what I needed.

Global fade/preset selection is an awesome feature.

You should see the hilariously huge patch I’ve been building, this is going to make my life so much easier.

Cheers!

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few weeks ago i made sth similar with the Homography (Transform 2d) which i used with a moving Videobeamer. was quite fun to have extreme keystone distortions corresponding to the beamer’s pan/tilt movements…