How SCS Works

The Show Cue System reads a list of cues and sub-cues from a selected Show Cue File (saved with a .scs or .scsq extension), and displays a list of the cues in the upper part of the main screen. Where a cue contains multiple sub-cues, only the first sub-cue is displayed in this list.

Facilities are available to create a new Show Cue File or to edit an existing Show Cue File.

	Audio File	An audio file, such as a WAV, MP3 or WMA file, with required level, pan, fade-in and fade-out times, looping start and end points, speaker assignments, etc.
	Video/Image	Video files, such as AVI and WMV (including high-definition WMV) can be played provided the necessary video format CODEC is installed. If SCS detects two or more displays connected to your computer then videos will be played to the second display, which would typically be a video projector. During your cue design phase you may not have a second display available, so if SCS finds only one display connected then videos are played in a panel towards the right-hand side of the main screen. The audio track for a video file will be played through the Windows default audio device. You can set the audio level as required, and for many productions you may wish to mute the audio completely. Still image files, such as JPG, GIF and BMP, can be displayed in a similar manner to videos.
	Playlist	For pre-show and intermission music you may want to assemble a list of audio file tracks to play, and then when the show is about to start or resume you want to fade out and stop the music, regardless of how far thru the list you have played. The Playlist is designed for this. You can include as many audio files as you want and play them either sequentially or randomly. You can set up cross-fades if required, and nominate the duration of the overall fade-out time.
	Level Change	New level and/or pan required for a nominated audio file cue, designed to enable you to change these settings sometime after the audio file has started playing. For example, this could be used at the start of scene when an actor comes on stage and the audio level of the scene change music is to be lowered but not faded out completely.
	Stop / Fade-Out / Loop Release	This enables you to set up a cue to stop or fade out an earlier cue. If you have specified looping start and end points for an audio file, you can also release the audio file from the loop using the Loop Release cue type. Releasing a loop causes the audio file to continue as normal but when it next gets to its 'end of loop' position it will continue to the end of the file (or to the cue's end point) instead of looping back.
	Note	Notes are basically cues without sub-cues. They can be used to remind you of non-cue events, such as 'End of Act 1', 'House Lights', etc.
	'Go To' cues	(Currently implemented using a specific format of Description for a Note cue.) Jumps to a new position within a currently-playing cue. (Available in SCS Professional and higher license levels.)
	'Set Position' cues	(Currently implemented using a specific format of Description for a Note cue.) Jumps to a nominated cue in the cue list, enabling you to set up loops of cues. (Available in SCS Professional and higher license levels.)
	Control Send	Control Send cues enable you to control other devices directly from SCS where a compatible interface is available. For example, you could send a Recall Snapshot MIDI message to a digital mixer, or a scene change MIDI message to a lighting board.

A cue may contain just one of the above, or any combination of the above including multiple instances of any sub-cue type. Typically, a cue will be just an audio file cue, or just a stop cue, etc. But you can set up a cue containing, for example, an audio file, a stop for an earlier cue, a control send to change a lighting scene, and a control send to activate a pyrotechnics event.

Where a cue contains more than one of these sub-cue types, the cue is regarded as having sub-cues. Internally, SCS treats every cue as having one or more sub-cues (except Note cues), but to simplify the interface the sub-cues are normally only significant where there are two or more.

Production-level properties can also be set. This is where you can define what speaker assignments you want for the show.

When the cue file has been read, the audio files for the first few sound cues are immediately loaded. This is the way SCS always operates - it ensures the audio files for the next fifteen sound cues are always loaded, so there should be no delay in playing cues. This also assumes you have removed any silence from the beginning of the audio file itself. Information on doing this for wave files is discussed under Preparing Sound Files.

Cues are manually activated by clicking the button at the top of the screen labelled Qn - Go! where Qn is the label given to the sound cue (it doesn’t have to start with Q - you can label your cues as you wish, eg FX 1, S/C 1, etc). Cues can also be activated automatically a specified time after the start or end of another nominated cue, or even at a specified time before the expected end of another cue. Some cues may also be set up as hot key cues, which means they are started by pressing a keyboard key. SCS also has the ability to activate cues from MIDI, RS232, DMX and Telnet input messages (provided you have the appropriate license level).