garageCube

I recently did the A/V for a 'video journalism awards' show.
I handled the show in Modul8 and it went well, the organisers were happy. Still I feel I needed something better suited for this job. It's not far off to say I needed a mix between Modul8 and Powerpoint for this show. I don't know if M8 was designed with this sort scenario in mind but here is my two cents.

You know how this kind of show goes: A video trailer is played, a winner takes the stage and says thanks. The host presents the next nominees etc. There was a load of elements - names, titles, video trailers, and two live cameras that must not be mixed up or triggered at the wrong time. Yet I had to improvise when the host left the script and mixed up the sequence of events.

I had to trigger multiple elements at once and in sequence. For instance I had a video trailer, the titles of the video + some background graphics. Three layers in all. This went on with 20 different trailers - too many to put in separate layer sets. Instead i triggered them manually from the media library. The whole time I was afraid to make a mistake - like putting the wrong title on a video trailer.

Imagine I did have 20 layersets. Still I would need to be able to name them or preview them in order to not mix them up.

Also I was missing some in/out transitions. You know, things that fade in or zoom in without me having to do it by hand.

I would like to hear what the developers say. Will there be something in store for this kind of scenario in future versions or is this too far from what you had in mind when you made M8?

hi vibber,

we had to do some events like that ourselves, it was really hard to follow the things, if there's not someone next to you telling you when things happend, you're sure tu f.... up something… for a pretty big client, we had to project two different contents, on two screens, showing images that where related to a speech… it was going so fast… we were two manipulating two modul8 plus a guy with the script giving us tips about the next thing to show… very stressful… but in this kind of things, I think modul8 is a great tool, because a speech is never the same when it's spoken as on paper and the modul8 flexibility is really helpful to manipulate things in real time and let the crowd think it's all prepared!

But for instance, in the theatre environment, a kind of timeline is required, for the things that hardly change in time. We are really aware of that and it's something that will be really present in the version 3. I won't say more about v3 as it's too far from now to say anything, but your problem is a big point on our todo list

Perhaps you should consider taking the advice given on the other forum.

Modul8 is great but its not perfect for every task, not yet anyway.


I also hear that Powerpoint 2010 will address most of your requirements

Powerpoint? *LOL*. That will be the day...

Check it out before you scoff, now does proper video importing, text over video, multi video layers, transitions and all the other dull stuff its always done.

Would be crap for VJ work (but you got MD8 for that right) but for AV corporate land might make your life easier for those types of job.

Or wait for V3

You want QLab, brilliant, solid, reasonable, even rental...
http://figure53.com/qlab/

And Qlab is also definitely not a VJing app.

Neither is Powerpoint, but thanks for the tip anyway. I will check out the suggestions

moonbase wrote:You want QLab, brilliant, solid, reasonable, even rental...
http://figure53.com/qlab/

Thanks for posting that. Very interesting tool. I might not have an immediate use for it, but it's definitely something that I can imagine being useful in the future.

@ VJnutcracker

Powerpoint. Ha. I'll believe that when I see it. If you're going to go that route, Keynote would almost certainly be a better bet. On that note, I actually use Keynote in conjunction with M8 quite a bit--primarily to generate things like text animations. It works great!

G mint, do you render text animations in keynote or how do you get them into m8?

Vibber wrote:G mint, do you render text animations in keynote or how do you get them into m8?

I just export them as PhotoJPEG movies. They're not dynamic or anything, but it's quick. Kind of like a poor-man's Motion...