[QLab] multiple languages

[Andy Leviss]

On Nov 6, 2007, at 11:56 PM, Vincent Olivieri wrote:

> I'm working on a show and using QLab to run sound and video.  The  
> video is
> mostly supertitles.  Our challenge is that we're designating some  
> nights
> 'English-language night' and some nights 'Spanish-languge night.'  I'm
> searching for an easy way to swap between english slides and  
> spanish slides.
> Is there an easy way to do this with QLab?

LOL, funny you should ask. I'm in a similar situation, as I've spent  
the last two months mixing an off-Broadway show that does six  
performances a week in Spanish, two in English, and has voiceover  
playback cues.

I've come up with two ways to do it, one I'm currently using, and one  
I'm working on switching over to, both of which use Automator to do  
the magic outside of QLab.

The simple way, but a PITA to program, is to have two duplicate  
shows, and then I wrote a simple automator script that pops up a  
selector for me to select which show to boot into. Even with only a  
few cues to change, though, this is a royal pain to update when the  
show changes. So, I started plotting...

I'm working on an automator script that will be set up so that I've  
got an English folder, a Spanish folder, and a Tonight folder. The  
script will delete all the files from the Tonight folder, ask for the  
language, copy the appropriate language source files into the Tonight  
folder, and then launch the QLab workspace.

The cues in QLab are all referenced to the Tonight folder, and since  
QLab autoupdates when it loads, I'm fairly sure all will be kosher. I  
just need to wrap my head around the workings of the automator  
script, or see if I just need to cave and learn AppleScript to get it  
to do what I need. Maybe will toy with it some more tonight.

If you're doing it with audio cues, you just need to make sure you  
match levels in the source file; the only place it gets ugly, then,  
is when you've got sequences of multiple cues and the different  
languages (or understudy vo's, or whatever) have different timings.  
Would be nice if there was a way to do variables and scripts in QLab  
(something that SFX6 does, although I still prefer QLab :-) or at  
least to get QLab to allow you to target a cue list in a separate  
workspace (this way the automator script could swap the workspace  
file instead of the source files).

FWIW, and hope it helps,
Andy