Hey all. If anyone is reading this and interested in what happened on my last show, here it is:
I had two college student
FoH operators at the sound
desk - one was focused on mixing on our 32
channel board with 14 body packs plus the
orchestra. The other person focused on sound & video playback, assisting the lead
mixer with cues, and was on comm.
I ended up making all of my
cue notes (playback and actor entrances/exits) on a PDF using
Preview (I'm Mac-only when it comes to live production). I made most of the notes on my laptop (running Mountain Lion) and the operators were using Mavericks on an iMac. (I mention this because the
Mac Pro they were controlling remotely was on Yosemite, and the PDF notations came out extremely ugly with outlines on every note! It didn't like switching that many versions, I guess.) Two screens at
FoH were connected to the iMac via a
VGA splitter - so
Qlab was running on the main
screen, and the two monitors (either end of the
desk for operator comfort) had the PDF open for viewing.
The tech on comm & playback ran her show, and I wrote a little applescript that was a
page-turner, forward and back, via hotkeys. As they advanced through the show, she hit a key to tell
preview to turn the
page, and
restore focus to
Qlab so she never had to click back on the window - it all executes extremely fast. It worked flawlessly (I even had a script at the top of the show autoload the pdf and open to the correct
page, two pages up side by side). The operators we also able to add their own notes in the margins and edit mine during the course of tech week.
Sounds like a lot of gear, but really, when you're building a whole
FoH system, an extra two monitors ain't nothing.
We're a community college with limited budget, but most institutions have a couple of monitors lying about (as the sound and video super, I tend to hoard them when I can, haha!)
So,
point is, this worked really well.
-brian