19/07/2020
Mainstage & Video.
Lockdown gave me the opportunity to tackle the problem of rear projection videos for specific shows.
We all know MS doesn’t support video sync. And during gigs you simply can’t mess about. This means if you have videos, they must to be cut to your backing track and start at the same time.
If you’re like me (operating on the budget from hell), a separate video server is out of the question... and if you have bags of cash, a powerful server offers video lock, which makes the case for moving audio to it, which flies in the face of a million brilliant reasons to keep the audio in MS such as processing locked effects, running multiple stems or a million other reasons relating to your on FOH audio / monitoring / in ear connections (if you know what you’re doing).
So the task is to trigger video playback a cheaper device, like an iPad; without sacrificing inputs and other connections you may already have allocated.
Now, I’m not l pretending this is an ideal solution. But it’ll do for now until Apple integrate Video into Mainstage.
My answer is use MS to send a wireless midi CC command to an iPad, and on that iPad is an app, listening for such a command. And yes, it’s working. The current challenge is load latency, where the iPad needs a few seconds to load the video on my 6 year old old IPad Mini 2. But nevertheless, it actually works.
If you want specific assistance in setting this up, reach out.
