Theatre cues with music

[janvanbesien]

I am trying to figure out the most straightforward way to program something that is very typical for me in theatre productions:

Assume static scene A is playing.

I want to program a sequence as follows:
- cue1: start music and a few seconds later fades light to scene B
- cue2: fade light to scene C and a few seconds later fade-out music

Until now I have been doing this "manually": a bank with scenes A, B and C with just lights and a separate "music" bank with music-only superscenes. This works, but means I cannot just "play next scene" upon every cue, I have to trigger the music separately.

If it were all time-synchronized, I could just make a super scene and throw away the cues. But the reality in theatre is that actors don't always walk/play at the same tempo.

I was able to come up with the following, but it's tedious:

- static scene A
- a dummy "trigger scene" with a very short duration that jumps to static scene B and to the music scene in the "music" bank
- scene B with steps to delay the fade in of the lights
- a static scene C
- a dummy "stop music" scene that releases the "music" bank but does not release the current bank (to ensure scene C keeps playing). Ideally I'd want this to trigger automatically after a few seconds
- ...

I mean.. it works, but this is tedious.

What would help is if I every scene would have "at start" and "add end" triggers (with wait times) rather than the current "release mode" and "jump to". That would allow me to program something like this:

- static scene A
- scene B with steps to delay the fade in of the lights with a "at start" trigger to turn on the music scene
- a static scene C with a "at start" trigger that releases the "music" bank after a given wait time
- ...

All ideas welcome.

Jan