Re: vog001 – LiveStage Pro for dummies

In my application for admission into the MA program I proposed to use a cycle of “Action-Research”, so was time I actually got down to some interactive video action.

My first experiment was going to be a very simple sequence of video loops which would play infinitely until the user clicked on them, at which point the next loop would load. I knew how to do this using html (I’ll explain how this works in detail in another post) but I wanted to have a play with LiveStage Pro and see how its scripting/programming language “Qscript” works. I also wanted to work out how to have each of the loops pre-load so that there would be instant feedback between clicking on one loop and triggering the next.

After a few hours of playing with LiveStage Pro I decided to read the manual. I usually pick up the basics of a new program pretty quickly since most applications share similar conventions for tools, timelines and assigning actions and variables but I think my experience with programs such as Director, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro and Storyspace actually slowed me down a bit in this case.

In Director and Final Cut Pro for example, everything revolves around the time line and while you can reference content files such as movies and sounds, the final product you are usually aiming for is a fairly self contained “Projector” file (Director) or a discrete ‘final’ quicktime movie or MPEG-2 ready to go to tape or DVD. In Livestage Pro (LSP) the timeline doesn’t function the same way and the output is infinitely modular and stackable. Rather than making a self contained movie, LSP is biased towards referencing sub-movies which can, themselves, reference sub-movies. Any of these movies can contain “Sprites” and scripts which control and manipulate each other [If you can get them to work ].

While the timeline is a bit different to other programs, the scripting and actions which make movies interactive had me confused and frustrated for a long time. The manual says that each script has two parts: a target (something like ThisMovie) and an action (something like SetRateTo) and can be triggered by an event (something like Mouse Up). I found a couple of good references on Qscript at totallyhip.com (The makers of LSP) and Qscript Crash Reference, but it was only when I found samples at totallyhip.com that I was able to get anything to work.

Whenever I tried to run multiple movie tracks and activate and de-activate them with Qscripts the program would unexpectedly quit, so I ended up trying to get the program to do something else. The other idea I wanted to explore was varying the playback speed of a movie in real time depending on user input. Luckily I found a sample file which did just that. By replacing a flash track with one of my movies and changing a few constants I was able to make a movie that actually responds to user input without crashing!