Archive for August, 2008
Play All 3 - just three scripts to play all!
A new tutorial has been added to the site which looks at how you can use just three scripts to cover any number of tracks and stories in your project and make sure you get a reliable ‘play all’ situation.
This is very different from the earlier scripted example, which uses a script for every track to sort out the end jump and allows you to use the exact track names in your project. This is excellent for when you want a simple system that is easy to follow and does what you expect. However, if you are ready to move on with your scripting, this tutorial introduces you to using item values from your project. The advantage is that you don’t need to worry about track names, you can add as many tracks as you like and it will still work with no additional lines of code needed. You *do* need to edit a line in each script, but that’s a very small job!
Have a look here:
Advanced Scripting Techniques, Random Playback Scripts
A new tutorial exploring the use of advanced scripting techniques has been created, which uses bit based techniques to generate a random number and jump to a track or story. It checks to see if the track or story has been played before and if so generates a new random number.
The tutorial is theoretical, and doesn’t have a set of files to download yet, but looks at how to track up to 40 tracks/stories. This means that the tracking has to use 40 bit slots, or two and a half registers, leaving the remainder for calculations. This is more than enough, and in fact twice the number of clips could be tracked using this technique.
As it is only theoretical, there may be some flaws in the scripts, but it is offered as a starting point for experimentation and discussion. It uses fairly basic maths for the most part, but makes use of the ‘AND’ operator to compare two GPRMs. Previously, the ‘and’ has been used almost exclusively on this site to mask off different sets of bits.
The tutorial can be found here:
http://www.dvdstudiopro.co.uk/scripting-advanced-random-playback/
