In some areas of our industry, people are using media servers to serve images from a PowerPoint presentation instead of running it directly from a computer. While this can save some money upfront, it is often filled with more complications than is necessary. I was involved with a show that had six presenters, each with their own PowerPoint presentation. The crew chief suggested that we export the PowerPoint presentations to jpegs and then upload these images to the media servers. The crew chief did not trust PowerPoint to run well during the show and thought the media servers offered less risk. However, this crew chief knew little of automated lighting programming and did not know all the complications he was creating with his suggestion. While I could program the simple cuing rather easily, this now meant that my cue list for the show would increase by over 200 cues. Furthermore, I would be responsible for advancing the slides during the presentation by watching for a signal that the presenter wanted to go to the next slide. Further complications developed as the presenters wanted to change or update their presentations. The entire export and upload to the servers had to occur again, thus slowing down the rehearsal. This process was costing large amounts of rehearsal time, and was affecting the integrity of the entire production. Ultimately, the director put a stop to this plan and we switched to a computer running PowerPoint under direct control of the stage manager. The production was then able to work perfectly even with wasted time and money on media servers and their programming.
From “Feeding the Machines” by Brad Schiller, PLSN, Sept. 2009
