Posts Tagged ‘Show Control’

Alcorn McBride in Sound & Communications

Friday, August 6th, 2010

In the July edition of Sound and Communications, Eric Wolfram from Integrisys Group writes about the recent upgrades to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.

“…In designing the AV system, we were quite aware of the museum’s need for something far more reliable than the typical commercial or residential project. ‘We are open 364 days a year and this system has to work on all of those days,’ Beckman told us. ‘It has to have almost no maintenance and be simple to use: We want to just turn it on at the beginning of the day and then everything has to be automated from there.’ To meet the requirement for reliability, we used a solid-state, V16+ show controller from Alcorn McBride, with the video itself stored on two one-gigabyte flash cards, rather than tape, DVD or a even hard drive…”

Show Control Training at InfoComm

Friday, February 26th, 2010

We are well underway with our preparations for the upcoming trade shows. Our Engineering Team has been busy with product development. Over the past year, we have released five new products! (Digital Video Machine HD, ShowTouch, V4Pro, DMX OverRide, and the LightCue Pro). There is no slow down in sight for us as we prepare to launch the new SetPlayer HD for on-set video to the Broadcast Market at NAB and new audio and video players at InfoComm. Whew! Good thing we keep our kitchen stocked with healthy snacks.

Worried about the flu? What about your projector’s health?

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Kidding of course, but we know that monitoring projectors and lamp hours is important to keeping your equipment in top shape.  John Conley, an Alcorn McBride Engineer, offers these useful tips.

One of the exciting new features of the V16 Pro and WinScript Live is the ability to read incoming messages and use that information in your script. You can do math, make logical decisions, send alerts and do all sorts of other things with the incoming message. When combined with one of our ShowTouch panels you can create a powerful maintenance diagnostic tool…read the full article and download free software at:

http://www.alcorn.com/library/appnotes/QueryingProjectors/index.html

When Your Own Product Surprises You

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

I recently helped John Conley, one of our application engineers, with an app note about collecting projector status using the V16 Pro. As one of the architects of our V16+ show controller, I had always been frustrated by the difficulty of collecting arbitrary data from remote devices and doing something intelligent with it. And although I was involved in specifying the feature set of the new V16 Pro, I hadn’t yet used one. I hadn’t realized how far Project Engineer Joy Burke had taken the data processing capabilities of the V16 Pro.

It turns out that even with a hellaciously complicated Ethernet protocol like the Panasonic projector’s, all you have to do is tell the V16 Pro its IP address. Then, by simply saying “GetLampHours” in your script, the values magically show up in a variable for you to do whatever you want with them.