Las Vegas icon Wayne Newton opened his latest, and possibly last, long term engagement in a Las Vegas showroom – Once Before I Go, staged at the Tropicana Hotel's Tiffany Theater. I was asked to work on this project, both as a lighting and video designer…There were several useful things I learned about using media servers with image-specific content. For instance, if you have a video that needs to run the entire length of the song, it is definitely better to cut it into sections and start each clip at an appropriate point in the song (verse, chorus, etc,) than to try to play one video or use Inframes and Outframes. Why? One reason, really. If you need to jump to a specific part of the song, the video will always be at the right part of the video. And if you need to restart that section, it works every time. But if you really need a second reason, it would be tempo. The band will inevitably speed up or slow down on any given night, and there is no way to get a video back in sync if it's all one clip. Another important tip is that you always need an emergency stop cue to reset a video clip, especially those that contain audio, because unless you release the whole fader, the clip will just keep playing, even when you want it to stop. I found that the simplest way was just to create a cue on a different fader with playmode set to Inframe and Inframe set to 0. That's all it really took, and it worked with any video, if we needed to restart for some reason.
From "Video Digerati" by Vickie Claiborne, PLSN, March 2010
