SFX 6.x has a neat telnet feature that allows you to interface with the outside world in a rather easy way, sending commands to a remote system to perform some task. This article is about a Video Slide Service I wrote to assist with the video needs of a show I was working on at the time.
The service allows you to load video images, fade them on and off screen, and overlay text. You can specify the text color, font size and position. There needs to be a computer on the LAN running this service. I’ve used a laptop a couple of times. The laptop display is configured to output to the video projector.
Once installed, you go into SFX production and add a telnet patch. You can name it VSLI. The port is 3999 by default, but you can configure it by editing the VSLI.INI file.
Once patched, you can add the telnet command to any cue list, and start controlling your video slides. A typical sequence might be to clear the screen and load images in one cue, then fade through a sequence of images in another.
This sequence clears the screen, then loads image1.bmp as id 01, and images2.bmp as 02. A dog and cat image is also loaded. Image identifiers do not need to be numbers.
Clear File(01,image1.bmp) File(02,image2.bmp) File(dog,running_dog_image.bmp) File(cat,sleeping_cat_image.bmp)
That was the setup cue, which should be run before the display is actually needed. This next cue will sequence through the four images, cross-fading each in over two seconds, with five seconds in between each image.
FadeGroup(100,20,50,01,02,dog,cat,0)
That zero at the end is a special image ID indicating “background”. In this case, it fades the last image back to clear.
Another cue might then toss some text up on the screen.
TextColor($ff0000,0) XYText(C,M,Hello World!) XYText(0,B,More to come)
The “C” in the X position indicates to horizontally center the text, and the “M” in the Y position indicates to vertically center the text. You can specify an absolute position, or additionally “B” for bottom, and “R” for right justify.
There is also an option to merge an image into the current display. This is useful for interactive shows, where you might want to “mix” images in different ways. This cue will merge in the image connected to identifier “dog” in a four second operation.
Merge(dog,100,40)
There are other commands, and they can be listed by using windows telnet to connect to the service, then use the command HELP. Other commands include setting the font size, selecting a font, and releasing images from memory.
The original version of this was written in April 2010, and is one of several telnet services I wrote for SFX. Being that these services are accessible with telnet, they are not limited to use with that program, and could be used from a telnet window or other cuing program.
If you need a custom telnet service or you have an idea for a missing command for this one, I’d be willing to discuss it.