Midi Control Capabilities with Stage Cue

SMowat

Hello,
I'm looking into Stage Cue as a means of launching video live with my band. I'm curious if there is a "skip" function that is programmable via midi. I want to be able to have a single midi foot pedal that can skip forward to the next lined up video in a given sequence, sort of like chapters (so every time I hit the foot pedal it skips forward to the start of the next video). Does anyone know if this is possible using Stage Cue?

AnthonyB

SMowat in short, I don't believe so. The only way to trigger a video to play would be to send the relevant MIDI trigger info you program for each video.

You can set the Play mode of a video to "Play Next" once it finishes, but that wouldn't give you the control to choose when to trigger the start of the next video.

Are you thinking of just having some videos that are in Play Mode of "Loop", that you can then (ideally) click a 'next video' trigger to advance to the next video on the main screen?

I like the idea as a feature request if Peter doesn't respond with a way to do it in the current version that I've overlooked!

SMowat

AnthonyB Yeah that's pretty much exactly what I'm talking about. Each section we play has a corresponding video component, and instead of playing to a click we trigger the next video at the start of each section to account for minor shifts in tempo etc. based on the night.

peter

This skip action is actually a good idea. It definitely makes sense when a video is setup with the next play mode. But how about the other play modes? What should that action do in those?

SMowat

peter It would be cool if on "loop" it restarted the loop, sort of like a sampler (although it may already do this if you hit the same pad again).

AnthonyB

peter hmmm...

So, there are (currently) 4 play modes you can define for each video - Stop, Loop, Play Next, Background (ref: https://stagecue.app/user-guide/video-settings/)

I can answer that question multiple ways, but it sort of depends on how you want to think about SC main page, or how you may want to enhance it down the line.

Right now, it is essentially just a pallette of videos that you can manually trigger, or MIDI trigger. There is no "Queue" of videos defined really, beyond the order the videos sit on the page (and if you have the individual video's play mode set to 'Play Next').

So, to me, a global "Play Next" trigger could simply interupt whatever is (or is not) playing, and move to the next video. This is taking "Play Next" absolutely literally - 'play the next video'. Ignore what is occuring now (video stopped? video looping? Background video playing?) and just fire up the next video as per the layout on the screen.

Next option would get more technical in it's implementation, and may become more confusing, and that is to take into account the current video's play mode:

Play mode Stop - ?
Play mode Loop - restart loop? start next video?
Play mode Play Next - play the next video
Play mode Background - maybe play the next video? but what is the next video if may the 1st video in your list is Background, and it started after the 4th video (set to Stop) ran to completion then stopped then transition back to 1st video?

I think it could get too confusing.

Maybe it is time to think about adding Playlists and Queues (similar to ST) where it might become clearer what 'play next' and 'play previous' would actually mean in this context?

Maybe the idea of adding 'songs' to SC, where a song references videos in the SC video library, and plays a set of videos in a sequence that you setup. And, similar to ST network sessions and local lyric sheets, if SC has a song with same title and artist as the one playing in ST, then SC automatically 'plays' that 'song' (i.e. sequence of videos)?

peter

@AnthonyB I like your thinking. I agree with your first approach. "Play Next" should simply interrupt whatever is playing and play the next video after that. It should not matter which playback mode we are currently in. This makes it easy to anticipate what that command will do.

I will make a note on my todo list for the next update.