Watson

I was actually planning to ask about recommended ways to put the cues in a script, how much detail, layout, and so on, so I'm glad you mentioned it. Also about the best use of the descriptive panel in QLab. I have to stop now for tonight but tomorrow I'll post what I've been doing and ask for suggestions for improvements. Good night for now.

Yes, and - as others have just said but I've only just noticed - "beat" is much used as an actor's direction in play- and film scripts. So for a tech script, presumably "Wait 3 beats..." would be appropriate. And as with "1-and-2-and-3-and" it has the advantage of leaving the fine-tuning of the pause to the operator. Thanks for the thought. I like that (and the thought of Lucas's epic saga revolving entirely around the deployment of silverware) so many thanks. As well as conventional dialogue cues, I do have instances where a physical action is the trigger, but it was the best way to cue something in a moment of stillness and silence which puzzled me. I'm grateful for everyone's help.

Another vote for precision and unambiguity. Thanks. A very good point, though in my days at the BBC I did once accidentally enhance a tender scene in a Biblical epic by playing in the sound of a Galapogean giant turtle's mating call. Fortunately, it was only in a rehearsal: I think someone might have noticed if that had made it into the final show.

Thanks, though with the sort of quick-in quick-out single performances I'm anticipating, the opportunities are likely to be very limited. A tech stagger-through and - possibly - a complete run before the show tends to be the norm.

Clearly, if you ask a roomful of experts a question, you'll get a roomful of different answers... Now I'm uncertain again! But perhaps, given that one person's mental three seconds is unlikely to be exactly the same as another's, maybe [WAIT 1 and 2 and 3 and] would be a good way of leaving the exact final timing to the operator. Thanks for the idea, Junior8.

Many thanks for the new replies. Adding silence at the top of a track is clearly not a good idea. And I completely take the point that operators should be trusted to have an artistic input. So [Feel the pause...] is acceptable? That's good. Adam, you understand my position perfectly.

Thanks for that. Your point about knowing that the cue has fired is a very good one. Your second point is good too. What I'd really like to put is [Feel the pause then GO] but given the minimal amount of rehearsal time at each venue for an operator to get into the show artistically, is that a good idea? I do appreciate though that specifying a particular length pause is more mechanical than is ideal.

I'd welcome opinions on this: in the show I'm programming, I have two or three sound cues which have to be played after a moment of stillness and silence on stage, so they can't be directly cued by a line or by an action. It seems to me that there are two possible ways to manage this: [Note to George Lucas' lawyers: this is not the actual dialogue.] VADER: I am your father, Luke. [WAIT three seconds, then GO SFX 7] (Cue 7 being a dramatic clap of thunder) Or... VADER: I am your father, Luke. [GO SFX 7] (Where the audio track for cue 7 begins with a 3 second silence) The show is a small-scale one-man piece intended for festival performances, usually one night only, and using each venue's own tech staff, which means the absolute minimum of rehearsal. Any thoughts will be welcome. Thanks.

That did work (after I made some ham-fisted mistake the first time I tried it) so many thanks. Thanks too for explaining the Audio Levels/Audio Trim distinction. It would seem (to me, at least) more logical if Audio Trim ("input gain") was placed before Audio Levels ("fader setting") rather than after!

Ah, apologies for the confusion: as you realised, I was thinking of the "trim to time" capability in Time & Loops. Thanks for putting me straight. I must admit though, having now looked at it, that I can't immediately see the difference between Audio Trim and Audio Levels: there obviously is one though so I'll investigate further. Thanks. As an experiment, I batch-processed all my audio tracks in Audacity and saved the results to a different folder, but I can't work out how to insert them into my existing project in place of the non-normalised ones. I could start again from scratch with a new workspace but then I'd have to recreate all my fades, levels and transitions, which would be a bit of a fag. I'll probably forget about the preliminary normalising.

Thanks for that, but I just looked into Trim and it appears to be a way of adjusting how much of a track plays by setting start and end points in the waveform rather than anything to do with input gain adjustment. Have I misunderstood something?

Excellent. Thanks for that.

Thanks for the new replies. I was thinking of normalising before importing into QLab simply because my various audio tracks are at wildly differing levels and it seemed sensible to get everything into QLab on an equal footing. I'm new to the software and there are still many aspects that I haven't explored yet, Trim being one of them: I'll take a look at that.

Thanks. I was planning to use Audacity. Is there a particular level you'd recommend I normalise to, or is this something that can't be pinned down to a one-setting-suits-all-cases figure?

Thanks to everyone who offered thoughts and advice in my earlier QLab thread. I'm slowly getting to grips with the program (or at least with those areas of it that I need for the fairly basic show I'm working on to begin with). I do have an additional question: I thought I'd seen reference to this somewhere but can't find it again. All but one of the tracks in the project are sound effects and most are recorded at various different levels, so It seems sensible to normalise them in order that setting the individual levels in QLab can start from a common basis; but is there a recommended level to normalise to in order to allow for headroom where it might be needed? Thanks.

Thanks to TomHoward and AndyJones for the new replies and excellent advice. I've now obtained a MacBook Air and have spent this evening trying to get to grips with the basic ins and outs of the operating system. Tomorrow I plan to download and install Qlab and have a play around with it; everyone's suggestions and hints will be much clearer with the actual software in front of me, though I'm quite sure that I'll have more questions as I begin to find out just what it can do, I hope this is an appropriate place to ask them. We've talked about the best ways to mark up cues in a script. It would be both interesting and very helpful to see some instances of how people here like to see this done: if anyone knows of good examples online anywhere, or perhaps wouldn't mind posting a page or two here, I'd love to see them. Thanks again.

That's a good point, thanks.

Richard, thanks for your thoughts. Why after the first venue and not in preparation for it? That way, if the venue does have QLab. they can load it into their own system as you suggest.Using the venue's own gear would also eliminate the risk of damage to my own laptop: that's a possibility I hadn't considered. Yes, I plan to do exactly that. I hadn't realised that, but isn't it possible that the degree of level change would have to vary from venue to venue? Dependent on size, acoustics, and other factors? That's why I was imagining live manual adjustment. Thanks; I've watched a few introductory videos on YouTube but until I actually have a Mac and the program itself to play with I haven't gone into more detail.

MarkPAman, thanks. I am planning to use the free version, yes.

Yes, that is the case. Thanks for clarifying.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the patch: are you saying that somewhere in the show file might be the information which tells the computer how and where to output the final signal, and that information could override the resident host program's own setting? I can see that this could be quite a serious problem. To be honest, it sounds a little unlikely that such a fundamental setting could be affected by data software, but of course you never know. If anyone can confirm whether or not this does happen, perhaps they could chip in. Thanks.

I am actually pursuing exactly that. Many thanks for the information about the QLab Bundle save.

TomHoward, that's a very good point. If I'm right in thinking that the QLab file holds not only the names and sequence of the cues but also the audio tracks themselves, it would be perfectly straightforward to let the venue have the whole package ahead of time. I'd still want the performer (or myself) to roll up with the company Mac so we'd be doubly backed up in the case of any problems. Thanks.

Gareth, many thanks for that; great advice. One of my many previous jobs was as a script reader for the BBC's radio drama department and I know exactly what you mean by since trying to decipher an unsolicited play script sent in by a would-be writer with huge enthusiasm but absolutely no idea at all of how to put what's in his head down onto paper, surely falls into a similar category of impossibility.

TomHoward, that's enormously helpful, thanks.