I’m forced to slam the computer down and restart it. The computer won’t respond to any kind of input, including the three-finger salute (it is about now that I once again remember why I really prefer working with Macs…). I insert a cue and click on the first video in the menu. Thinking I can still use Media Shout to play the videos with the new DVD playback feature, I drop the DVD in the drive (while the walk-in loop is running and people are walking in), and try to load up the cues. Less than 20 minutes after I discover the problem I have a DVD with all three videos on it.
I launch DVD Studio Pro and whip up a quick DVD. It’s now 4:45 and doors should be opening. I run back and quickly send all three videos from the FinalCut timelines right to Compressor and have them encode as MPG-2. Thankfully, I have a wicked-fast MacPro tower in my office on which my videos reside. Media Shout has just decided that playing AVIs with audio is no longer in it’s job description. I attach the PC’s hard drive to my MacBook Pro over the network and double check the videos for audio–they play perfectly. Common denominator? The first 2 are WMVs, the other 3 are AVIs. We tried the first 2 videos again, and we have sound. It’s now about 4:25 and we have doors opening in 20 minutes. I figured it was a Windows issue and re-booted. By this time, run through was for all intents and purposes over and I began digging into the problem. We got to video #4 and again had picture, no sound. Figuring it was a simple setting issue, we pressed ahead with run through. The first 2 went fine, but when we got to the third, we had picture but no audio. We had 5 videos to play this Sunday, which is a lot for us. We had no clue there was a problem until run through. I loaded up the script and all appeared fine. I pre-build the Media Shout scripts, and push them to our HP computer in the video booth before the team arrives.
It looked like everything was going to be fine at the start. Still, it was a complicated service cueing-wise and I really needed everything to work. Thankfully, we have a great team (and they could probably do the service without either of us there…) so it wasn’t to much of a burden. Our Creative Director, Craig, was out of town, which meant his duties fell to me. We’ve been having issues with it for a while, and this weekend was the final straw.
Though I gave Media Shout 3.5 a fair chance, it’s time to show it the proverbial door. I’ve been keeping a close eye on ProPresenter for about a year and a half, but was never in a position to implement it until now. If you’ve been reading this blog for more than a week, you knew it was coming.
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