Over the weekend I’ve been doing a whole lot of work on our video system restructuring. Move matrix A over to this rack, switcher here, patch these two components together, configure A to talk to B, you get the picture (If I configured it right at least). It made me realize just how much configuration can be done on your average system, you can make your system work much better for a particular show with a few simple tweaks in a web interface somewhere. On the other end of the spectrum, you can create a lot of problems for the less skilled user if something is misconfigured.

One day, I decided to look for some EOS hardware, a programming wing, maybe a fader wing. I figured that I use the actual hardware enough at venues, might as well get some of my own to bring, or program on. But after a quick trip to Full Compass, I realized that this gear is much more expensive than I could afford. Even used on eBay, this stuff holds it’s value (ETC hardware is usually VERY durable). So I figured I’d take on the challenge, and build a console myself, from scratch, integrating a couple extra features along the way. So, step one, the programmer.

Meowdy, long time no see! I’ve just migrated this blog over to AWS, in hopes that I can start being more active, and share more projects that I’m working on publicly. One such project I’ve been working on lately is a web extension called GamePad Navigator. To best explain what this project is, I’ll provide some background on how it came to be.

If you’ve managed to make it to this page, let me first say I’m sorry and offer a warning: This title is not clickbait, it does get worse from here, turn back now. For those of you willing to stick around and enjoy the Nathan Fielder-esque comedy that is relying on Google Sheets for mission-critical device monitoring, we’ll begin with a project overview.

As part of my job, I help run a small community cinema every now and again. Being a small community cinema, we don’t have all the fancy show control that the big guys do- But that’s not to say we don’t have enough toys to get the job done. Our system has, at it’s heart, a Black Magic Design 20×20 Smart Video Hub. If you’ve never worked with it before, it’s great, easily one of my favorite pieces of gear in any video workflow. It’s core feature is connecting any input to any number of outputs. This is really important for us, as our movies come on a variety of formats, Blu-Rays from distributers, a black box media server/player, Netflix (did you know they did professional movie distribution?), Etc. So for our space, we use the hub to matrix all those inputs to our main projector, front desk feeds, and our audio processing.

Recently, I’ve been picking up more and more video work. As a team of one, shaving every second off the process I can is paramount to meeting deadlines. That said, no one wants to view an ugly, confusing video. I’ve found the easiest way to make your message clear to the most people, watching in the all sorts of different circumstances is to add graphics to reinforce your point. These graphics can seem daunting to make, but with a little scripting magic you can make them totally automatic. An ideal template should be able to handle whatever is thrown at it, long segments of text, different lengths on the timeline, and even different layouts.