After setting up for a long-in-the-planning special 200th live show I had spent a lot of time splicing, dicing and timing a video show that would run with the live backing. Cantabile was running the whole show, with a second laptop handling the video from its media server, synced from Cantabile. Everything was set to perfection.
On arriving at the gig I asked where I would be sending the HDMI cable… “HDMI? We only have VGA.” I was shown to where a laptop running Windows XP was plugged into a VGA-only projector.
Needless to say we did not run our video show, but instead had an engineer trying his best to manually link the folder of videos we gave him to our live performance.
It just goes to show that sometimes even the best careful planning can be up-ended by the most mundane, yet overlooked, reason.
Once turned up to do a gig in a church hall. The stage was quite nice, decent height, enough room for a four piece rock band. We looked for power sockets. There were none. I found the caretaker. “Oh yes!” he said, and pointed to the sole example … at the other end of the hall. We ended up daisy chaining extension leads down the side and prayed that no one would disconnect one accidentally or on purpose.
My worst experience ever was unfortunately due to Cantabile 2 and me mucking up the configuration due to plugging in a USB2 audio device into a USB3 laptop port (other USB2 ports in use) and it didn’t like it. So it had to go into a USB 2 port - the other devices were not fussy. I knew that and usually set it up correctly. But on that gig I didn’t and plugged into into the USB 3 port by mistake.
The change in port causing a lack of the audio device really upset Cantabile and the states set up for each song (audio backing track and DMX cues in an MIDI file), and I made it worse not knowing what it was until I realised what it was. It is also at that point when I realised that it is all well and good having a backup of the config, but it us not much use when it is at home and a two hour round trip with one hour to go before the gig.
So I had to completely reprogram it from scratch, and was just about ready before the gig, but I was stressed out and then did not really enjoy it.
Cantabile 3 and now 4 is a complete step change in terms of the port virtualisation, so does not have the issue (and maybe I was using 2 in a way that led to it where another method would not have).
So the hard lessons learn were:
If a cable has to go in a specific port, then a decent labeller is your best friend, and label both the cables and the ports
Take you backups with you (or have them cloud accessible)!
Do a “what if” assessment for everything you have that could fail to ensure you have a recovery plan if something happens.
So @The_Elf , a great gotcha tale, as I am also HDMI only for the video (usually into my own projector), so into my “get out of jail” box of adapters I need to add a HDMI to VGA adapter.
And when it comes to power sockets. Yes. Been there and done that as well. Have also done gigs where the power is controlled by an audio trip if it gets to loud (usually as a result of some idiot moving next door to a pub and then complaining about the noise). So those are the ones where we used to be sneaky and find the sole socket close to the stage that was not on the trip (e.g. the cleaner’s socket for the vacuum cleaner) and run from that. Often the venues knew what we were doing and turned a blind eye to it so long as the volume was reasonable (but would have tripped). There were the odd one or two who would not condone it but could not figure out why the meters were in the region of tripping but it was not!
